AARON'S 
BREASTPLATE 


J.  REND  EL  HARRIS 


^^^^^^^.c-^     ^' 


^ 


/<-c. 


'T 


BOOKS  OF  THE  INNER  LIFE. 

Edited  by 

R.  F.  HORTON,   M.A.,  D.D. 


A  Series  of  Uniform  Volumes  written  or  prepared  by 
some  of  the  leading  Free  Churchmen  and  forming 
a  complete  Library  of  Devotion. 

L    The  Holy  Spirit. 

By  Rev.  W.  L.  Walker. 

II.  Private  Prayers  and  Devotions. 

By  Rev.  J.  E.  Roberts,  M.A.,  B.D. 

III.  Aaron's  Breastplate  and  other  Addresses. 

By  J.  Rendel  Harris. 

IV.  Themes  for  Hoars  of  Meditation. 

By  Rev.  W.  L.  Watkinson,  D.D, 
In  Preparation. 
V.    Habits  of  Holiness. 

By  Rev.  F.  B.  Meyer,  B.A. 

VI.    Volume  to  be  announced. 

By   Rev.  R.   F.    Horton,    M.A.,    D.D. 

VII.    Songs  of  the  Soul. 

By  Rev.  T.  H.  Darlow,  M.A. 


OTHER     VOLUMES     TO     BE    ANNOUNCED. 


London:   National  Council  of   Evangelical  Free   Churches, 
Thomas    Law,    Memorial   Hall,    B.C. 


BOOKS  OF  THE  INNER  LIFE 


III 
AARON'S   BREASTPLATE 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 


AND 


OTHER     ADDRESSES 


J.    RENDEL   HARRIS 
n 


LONDON:    NATIONAL    COUNCIL   OF    EVANGELICAL   FREE 
CHURCHE&     THOMAS  LAW,  MEMORIAL  HALL,  E.G. 

HEADLEY  BROTHERS,  14,  Bishopsgate  Street  Without,  E.G. 

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PREFACE 


THIS  little  book  contains  some  addresses 
recently  given  at  Free  Church  meetings 
during  the  year  in  which  I  have  had  the  honour 
and  happiness  of  presiding  over  the  Federation 
of  the  Free  Churches  of  England  and  Wales. 
I  am  afraid  there  is  not  much  contentious 
theological  matter  here  for  those  who  love  the 
noise  of  battle  and  the  clash  of  arms ;  and  party 
politics  find  also  no  space  or  scope.  Those 
who  look  for  either  of  these  in  a  collection 
of  Free  Church  addresses  must  necessarily  be 
disappointed  :  we  are  limited  by  our  organi- 
sation to  the  pursuit  of  love  and  holiness  and 
such  things  whereby  we  may  edify  one  another. 
Excuse  must  also  be  asked  for  the  disconnected 
character  of  the  subjects  chosen.  They  have 
been  given  at  various  times  and  places,  and 
are  printed  in  response  to  numerous  appeals  ; 


viii  PREFACE 

but  if  they  are  not  bound  together  by  any 
controlling  thought,  they  may  serve  to  give 
an  idea  of  the  teaching  and  testimony  in  our 
united  public  meetings,  as  well  as  at  some 
denominational  gatherings,  and  last,  but  not 
least,  amongst  my  friends  in  the  Settlement  at 
Woodbrooke. 

RENDEL   HARRIS. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER   I 

PAGE 

Aaron's  Breastplate  .  .  .1 

CHAPTER    II 
Ataraxia      .  .  .  .  .  -23 

CHAPTER   III 
MarV  and  Martha  .  .  .  -51 

CHAPTER   IV 
The  Use  of  the  Concordance  and   of  the  Bible 

Text-book         .  .  .  .  -77 

CHAPTER    V 
The  Lord's  Song  in  a  Strange  Land         .  .103 


X  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  VI 

PAGE 

The  Time-Machine  as  Applied  to  Religion  ,   123 


CHAPTER   VII 
The  Gift  of  the  Holy  Spirit       .  .  •   ^55 

CHAPTER   VIII 
Aaron's  Blessing      .  .  .  .181 


AARON'S   BREASTPLATE 


CHAPTER  I 


AARON  S    BREASTPLATE 


TN  the  28th  chapter  of  Exodus  we  have 
what  may  be  called  the  Ornaments  Rubric 
of  the  congregation  of  Israel,  an  inventory  of 
the  externals  of  the  priesthood,  with  minute 
directions  as  to  what  colours  and  fabrics  were 
to  be  employed  and  the  occasions  on  which 
the  holy  vestments  were  to  be  worn.  There 
are  people  who  devote  themselves  to  the  study 
of  Aaron's  wardrobe  (as  Milton  calls  it,  when 
he  speaks  of  the  Roman  and  Romanising  clergy 
as  decked  out  from  "  Aaron's  wardrobe  or  the 
flamen's  vestry,"  though,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  I 
believe  the  vestments  of  which  Milton  speaks 
are  only  the  ordinary  fashions  of  popular  dress 


2  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

in  early  Christian  centuries)  :  and  those  who 
thus  devote  themselves  do  so,  either  with  a 
view  of  imitating  those  early  dresses,  and  wear- 
ing them  on  the  state  occasions  of  their  religion, 
thus  becoming  nearer  to  God  by  the  art  of  being 
farther  from  men,  or  else  that  they  may  extract 
mystical  exegesis  out  of  the  biblical  accounts, 
and  prove  the  nature  of  the  redeemed  soul 
out  of  the  interpretation  of  coats  and  colours 
and  of  the  bells  and  pomegranates  that  are 
upon  the  vesture's  hem. 

Now,  I  am  not  one  of  those  who  extract  much 
comfort  or  distil  spiritual  medicine  out  of  these 
ancient  Levitical  accounts  ;  my  rule  in  such 
matters  is  Mrs.  Browning's  : — 

"  People  come  up  higher  :    Aaron's  tribe  is  dispossest." 

There  is  really  very  little  to  be  got  out  of 
the  sanctuary  and  its  services,  over  and  above 
what  has  already  been  extracted  by  the  writer 
of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  that  will  repay 
the  time  required  to  understand  them  ;  and 
practically  the  only  two  things  that  I  have  yet 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  3 

carried  ofF  as  legitimate  Christian  spoil  from 
rriy  raiding  of  these  accounts  are  (i)  the  high- 
priestly  benediction,  (2)  the  high-priestly 
breastplate.  Of  these  the  former  is  well  known 
to  be  the  benediction  in  use  in  the  Second 
Temple.  Whether  it  was  in  use  earlier  is 
uncertain.  It  is  sufficient  and  significant  that 
it  has  been  in  use  ever  since,  so  that  some  one 
must  have  struck  oil  somewhere,  and  some- 
when,  in  a  spiritual  sense.  You  recognise  it 
as  soon  as  I  repeat  it ;  it  has  often  been,  in 
detached  fragments  at  least,  a  part  of  your 
own  speech  and  prayer  : — 

"  The  Lord   bless  thee  and   keep  thee  ; 

"The  Lord  make  His  face  to  shine  upon  thee  and 
be  gracious  unto  thee  ; 

"The  Lord  lift  up  His  countenance  upon  thee  and 
give  thee  peace." 

There  is  nothing  antiquated  about  that,  nor 

any  suspicion   that    it    is,   or    will    be,   out    of 

date.     When  it  was  first  uttered  matters  little 

as  long  as  we  are  sure  that  it  will  continue, 

"and  that  we  make  a  diligent  use  of  it  in  the 


4  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

present.  The  second  Aaronic  feature  to  which 
I  propose  to  devote  attention  is  the  breastplate 
of  precious  stones,  which  we  find  described  from 
the  standpoint  of  the  lapidary  and  jeweller,  and 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  liturgiologist — an 
account  of  how  it  was  to  be  made,  and  how  and 
when  it  was  to  be  worn.  I  am  not  sure  whether 
there  are  not  two  accounts  of  Aaron's  jewellery, 
for  we  find  in  the  same  connection  a  description 
of  the  making  of  two  inscribed  plates  or  laminas, 
of  onyx  stone  according  to  the  popular  render- 
ing, but  more  likely  of  jade  stone,  on  which 
were  inscribed,  six  by  six,  the  names  of  the 
tribes.  The  two  plates  thus  designed  were 
attached  to  his  shoulder-gear,  and  if  you  like 
to  put  it  popularly,  he  carried  the  people  on 
his  back  in  a  sacramental  sense.  It  looks  as 
if  this  were  of  the  nature  of  a  duplicate  of 
the  other  account  about  the  placing  of  twelve 
stones  in  a  sacred  breastplate.  Whether  it  is 
so  is  a  question  for  critics,  and  I  don't  even 
spend  the  time  to  inquire.  For  as  the  breast- 
plate is   so   much   the    more  beautiful  symbol 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  5 

than  the  plate  of  onyx  or  jade,  I  stick  to 
that.  It  has  not  only  the  advantage  of  being 
more  beautiful,  but  the  involved  suggestion  of 
spiritual  intercession  is  more  clearly  brought 
out,  and  this  in  two  ways  :  first,  by  the  greater 
individuality  of  the  tribes,  to  each  of  which  a 
precious  stone  is  attached,  and  second,  by  the 
fact  that  the  holy  adornment  is  worn  on  the 
heart  and  not  on  the  shoulders.  The  import- 
ance of  these  distinctions  is  obvious.  When 
we  are  speaking  of  intercession  we  are  talking, 
in  a  disguised  way,  of  love  for  souls,  and  that 
is  not  a  matter  that  can  be  dealt  with  en  bloc. 
Even  the  tribe  has  to  be  disintegrated,  and 
the  beauty  of  souls  comes  out,  on  the  Lord's 
side  as  well  as  on  ours,  and  even  with  lost 
souls,  by  learning  them  and  loving  them,  one 
by  one.  And  as  to  the  difference  between  the 
shoulders  and  the  heart,  while  there  are  points 
of  view  where  it  means  the  same  thing,  as  when 
we  equate  the  sentences — 

"  He  shall  carry  the  lambs  in  His  bosom," 
and 


6  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

"  He  layeth  it  on  His  shoulders  rejoicing," 
there    are  other    considerations,    according   to 
which  the  carrying  of  people  does  not  necessarily 
mean  the  loving  them,  or,  if  it  does  mean  it,  it 
means  it  by  an  inadequate  symbolism. 

So  we  elfect  for  the  breastplate,  and  leave  the 
onyx  stones  or  jade  stones  alone. 

Now,  when  we  consider  the  High  Priest  of 
the  ancient  confession,  we  may  say  of  his 
liturgical  ornament  that  the  breastplate  was  a 
sort  of  book  of  remembrance  of  the  people 
for  whom  he  had  to  pray.  He  took  them 
into  the  place  of  secret  grace  and  secret  glory 
with  him,  and  when  he  drew  near  under  the 
wings  of  the  Shekinah  the  mysterious  light  of 
the  sanctuary  fell  upon  his  breastplate,  and 
every  separate  gem  began  to  glow  as  if  it  had 
been  a  living  soul.  Thus  he  stood  before 
the  Lord,  and  began  his  devotion  in  the 
form — 

"  Behold,  I  and  the  children  which  God  has 
given  me." 

You  will  remember,  in  passing,  how  obscurelv 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  7 

that  passage  is  introduced  as  descriptive  of 
Christ  in  Heb.  ii.  14,  as  follows : 

"  And  again,  Behold,  I  and  the  children 
whom  God  has  given  me. 

"  Forasmuch,  therefore,  as  the  children  are 
partakers  of  flesh  and  blood,"  &c. 

Evidently  the  writer  is  working  out  the 
thought  that  the  sanctified  and  the  sanctifier 
are  all  of  one,  a  truth  which  is  a  common- 
place in  the  region  of  Love,  however  difficult 
it  may  be  in  the  district  of  dogma  ;  and  it  is 
sufficient  to  say,  in  this  connection,  that  the 
appearance  of  the  High  Priest  in  the  sanctuary 
with  his  breastplate  of  precious  stones  is  a 
symbol  of  the  oneness  of  the  sanctified  and 
the  Sanctifier.  He  does  not  appear  without 
them,  nor  they  without  Him. 

To  put  it,  therefore,  as  we  have  said,  in 
simple  speech,  this  priestly  breastplate  was  a 
kind  of  book  of  remembrance  of  the  people  for 
whom  he  had  to  pray  ;  for  every  stone  was  an 
inscribed  stone,  and  the  names  sprang  into 
light  along  with  the  glory  of  the  jewels  upon 


8  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

which  they  were  written.  Let  us  examine  the 
matter  a  little  more  in  detail. 

I.  He  carried  with  him  the  body  corporate 
of  Israel  :  the  "  whole  family,"  if  we  may  put 
it  so,  was  there — I  mean  the  whole  family  as 
understood  in  that  day.  Since  then  the  praying 
soul  has  become  more  imperial  ;  it  has  become 
easier  to  detect  consanguinity  in  one  another. 
The  bounds  of  our  spiritual  habitation  have 
been  enlarged.  Judaism  was  too  short  a  bed 
for  the  Pax  Evangelica  to  stretch  itself  in.  Its 
tent  would  not  image  the  sky  adequately  unless 
the  cords  were  lengthened,  and  unless  there 
were  a  breaking  out  upon  the  right  hand  and 
upon  the  left.  There  must  be  a  "  Peace  to  the 
far  "  as  well  as  "  Peace  to  the  near." 

But,  from  Aaron's  point  of  view,  his  prayer 
was  comprehensive.  It  took  in  all  the  people  ; 
it  surveyed  the  length  and  breadth  of  Ini- 
manuel's  land  ;  it  flew  from  east  to  west  and 
from  the  north  to  the  south.  Dan  to  Beer- 
sheba  was  a  sacred  motion,  a  pilgrimage  of  the 
spirit.     He  did  not  leave  out  the  tribe  of  Dan 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  9 

because  the  Antichrist  was  to  come  from  thence, 
nor  forget  little  Benjamin  because  he  was  little. 
His  prayer  for  peace  and  his  benediction  of 
peace  was  in  the  manner  of  the  Psalmist, 
"  Peace  upon  Israel "  ;  and  St.  Paul  only 
bettered  it  by  extending  the  connotation  of 
Israel,  "  Peace  be  upon  them  and  upon  the 
Israel  of  God." 

It  is  no  small  grace  to  have  our  prayers  all 
right,  as  far  as  they  go  ;  a  defect  which  is  only 
undue  contraction  is  easily  mended.  The  ex- 
hortation that  prayers  be  made  for  all  men  is 
only  a  corollary  to  the  doctrine  and  duty  of 
love  to  all  men.  "  Thou  shalt  pray  for  thy 
neighbour  as  thyself,"  says  the  Spirit. 

2 .  The  High  Priest  carried  the  names  of  the 
tribes  upon  his  heart.  Amongst  them,  not 
inconspicuous  nor  forgotten,  was  the  tribe  to 
which  he  himself  belonged.  The  Book  of  Family 
Prayer  was  bound  up  in  the  volume  of  the 
Common  Prayer.  We  must  stay  at  home  as 
well  as  go  to  church.  The  Aaronic  priesthood 
says,  "  My  people  shall  be  thy  people,"     I  am 


lo  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

inclined  to  think  the  Book  of  Family  Prayer 
occupies  the  first  place,  and  there  are  intima- 
tions in  the  New  Testament  that  certain  forms 
of  appeal  in  this  part  of  the  book  have  a 
spiritual  right  of  way. 

Here  is  a  bit  out  of  an  old  family  Prayer 
Book  :— 

"  Lord,  I  beseech  Thee  to  have  mercy  upon 
my  son,  for  he  is  horribly  bedevilled." 

And  here  is  another  : — 

"  My  little  daughter  is  even  now  at  the  point 
of  death  ;  come  and  lay  Thy  hand  on  her  and 
she  shall  live." 

"  My  mother-in-law  is  sick  of  a  fever." 

And  what  shall  we  say  of  the  woman  who, 
when  she  could  not  successfully  cry  out  and 
pray  as  a  mother,  attained  her  end  by  barking 
like  a  dog  : — 

"  Truth !  Lord  :  children's  crumbs  will  do 
for  us,  or  whatever  falls  from  Thy  spread 
table." 

Abraham's  greatness  was  not  merely  in  his 
believing  God,   and  having  it  counted  to  him 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  il 

for  righteousness,  but  in  the  fact  that  he 
claimed  something  more  than  the  promise. 
The  Lord  hung  round  his  neck  a  precious 
promise,  an  elect  promise.  It  was  engraven 
with  the  art  of  the  jeweller  in  words  to  shine 
through  the  ages,  "  Blessed  be  Isaac."  "  In 
Isaac  shall  thy  seed  be  called."  And  the  man 
was  not  satisfied  with  his  gift.  He  began  to 
suggest  that  another  stone  might  be  given  him 
as  a  pendant  to  his  chief  ornament.  "  Oh 
that  Ishmael  might  live  before  Thee  !  "  said 
he.  It  was  an  enlarged  edition  of  the  Prayer 
Book,  but  no  doubt  there  was  a  blank  page  left 
for  it  in  the  Book  of  the  Covenant,  for  it  is 
written,  "  Concerning  Ishmael  also  I  have  heard 
thee." 

3.  Under  the  same  head  of  tribal  and  family 
intercessions  we  must  group  his  prayers  for 
himself,  for  how  could  he  invoke  a  blessing 
on  Levi,  and  be  himself  outside  the  blessing 
of  Levi  ? 

And  it  was  not  in  any  secondary  sense 
that  these  prayers  were  offered.     The  Epistle 


12  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

to  the  Hebrews  suggests  that  they  were 
first-rank  prayers.  "  He  offered  up  sacrifice, 
^rsl  for  himself y  and  then  for  the  errors  of 
the  people."  We  are  to  lift  up  hands  of  prayer, 
"  both  for  ourselves  and  those  who  call  us 
friend,"  or  relative  or  tribesman,  as  the  case 
may  be.  It  is  not  ridiculous  that  a  man  should 
lie  upon  his  own  heart.  Peter  was  upon  his 
own  heart  when  he  cried,  "  Lord,  save  me." 
And  the  poor  woman  in  the  Gospel  prayed  for 
herself  and  her  daughter  in  quite  a  confusing 
way  :  "  Lord,"  she  said,  "  have  mercy  upon 
me,  my  daughter,"  &c.  And  when  she  is 
repelled  she  cries  out,  "  Lord,  help  me."  Is 
that  tribal  praying,  or  does  it  not  rather  mean 
that  she  presented  her  own  soul  intercession- 
ally  with  her  daughter's .''  But  whether  the 
daughter  is  the  pendant  to  the  mother  or  the 
mother  to  the  daughter,  I  will  not  venture 
to  decide. 

I  have  drawn  attention  to  this  point  of  view, 
not  so  much  because  people  need  special  encour- 
agement  to   pray  for  themselves,   but  because 


AARON'S   BREASTPLATE  13 

some  neglect  their  families  and  some  themselves. 
So  I  shall  say  that  we  are  stones  in  our  own 
breastplates. 

As  we  are  instructed  in  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  to  consider  the  great  High  Priest  of 
our  confession — and  indeed  the  writer  will  never 
consider  the  elder  priesthood  except  in  the  light 
of  the  newer  and  greater  office — we  may  ask  the 
question  whether  Jesus  wore  a  breastplate  of 
the  Aaronic  model,  or  similar  to  it. 

There  are  some  things  in  the  New  Testament 
which  suggest  that  the  twelve  tribes  of  Israel 
were  replaced  by  the  twelve  Apostles  of  the 
Lamb  in  the  early  tradition.  Yq^  remember, 
for  example,  how  the  writer  of  the  Apocalypse 
has  imitated  the  stones  of  the  breastplate  in  the 
foundations  of  the  city,  and  how  he  says  these 
foundations  are  the  apostolic  men,  no  more  and 
no  less  !  And  there  is  no  doubt  of  the  nearness 
to  Christ  of  those  whom  He  had  specially 
chosen  to  be  with  Him.  But  then  we  must  not 
press  this  numerically,  for  two  reasons  :  first, 


14  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

because  if  we  emphasise  the  grouping  of  men 
around  the  Lord  too  closely,  we  shall  find  an 
inner  circle  of  three  or  four  within  the  twelve  ; 
and  second,  because  we  shall  find  an  outer  circle 
beyond  the  twelve,  betrayed  sometimes  by  a 
stray  expression  like  "  Jesus  loved  Martha  and 
her  sister  and  Lazarus  "  (which  makes  a  fresh 
row  of  beautiful  stones  on  the  breastplate  with 
a  pearl  in  the  middle,  a  turquoise  on  the  left, 
and  a  crystal  on  the  right).  And  sometimes 
the  disclosure  is  made  of  an  infinitely  wider 
constituency  of  love  and  service,  as  when  the 
Master  says,  "  Neither  pray  I  for  these  alone, 
but  for  all  them  that  shall  believe  through  their 
word."  We  may  say  of  Christ's  intercession 
that  it  was  a  capacious  breastplate  upon  a  uni- 
versal heart.  The  length  and  breadth  of  the 
Lord  is  not  measured  on  the  same  scale  as  the 
length  and  breadth  of  Aaron  ! 

You  can  see  Him  clothing  Himself  with  this 
breastplate  along  with  the  other  high-priestly 
vestments ;  you  can  see  Him  studying  each 
individual  stone.     This  one  will  fall   out  and 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  15 

be  broken,  but  "  I  have  prayed  for  thee, 
Simon  "  ;  and  this  one  will  fall  out  and  be  lost 
altogether,  being  a  Son  of  Loss,  that  the  Scrip- 
tures might  be  fulfilled,  whatever  that  may  mean. 

Every  stone  in  this  plate  was  regarded  by 
Jesus  as  a  gift  from  the  Father.  You  have, 
no  doubt,  noticed  how  often  that  thought 
recurs  in  John  xvii.,  and  in  how  many  lights 
the  breastplate  sparkles  : — 

"  Those  whom  Thou  hast  given  Me,  I  give 
them  eternal  life." 

"  They  were  Thine  and  Thou  gavest  them 
Me." 

'*  I  pray  for  those  whom  Thou  gavest  Me, 
they  are  Thine." 

And:— 

"  Keep  in  Thy  Name  those  whom  Thou 
gavest  Me." 

'*  I  kept  those  whom  Thou  gavest  Me,  and 
watched  them,  and  none  of  them  is  lost 
except  .  .  ." 

*'  I  will  that  those  whom  Thou  gavest  Me, 
be  with  Me." 


l6  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

Surely  it  is  right  to  say  that  Jesus  regarded 
each  separate  stone,  and  the  whole  breastplate 
of  them,  as  the  Father's  gift  to  Him.  As 
such  He  received  them,  and  as  such  He  re- 
members them ;  or,  as  the  writer  to  the 
Hebrews  says,  "  He  ever  liveth  to  intercede 
for  them." 

Now,  it  will  easily  be  seen  that  this  wearing 
of  a  priestly  breastplate  passes  over  into  an 
experience  of  the  individual  believer. 

If,  for  example,  you  watch  St.  Paul  at  his 
work,  and  in  his  apostolic  office,  you  will  find 
that  he  is  in  possession  of  such  an  adornment. 
You  can  see  it  in  several  ways  : — 

1.  He  prays  for  the  old  nation  from  which 
he  was  sprung  :  "  My  heart's  desire  and  prayer 
to  God  for  Israel  is  that  they  may  be 
saved." 

2.  He  prays  for  the  new  people,  with  whom 
he  is  in  a  common  citizenship  :  "  For  this  cause 
I  bow  my  knees  to  the  Father  ...  of  whom 
every  family  in  heaven   and  earth  is  named." 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  17 

3.  He  prays  for  individual  souls  and  for 
groups  of  souls  in  whom  he  is  interested. 
"  My  God,"  he  says,  with  the  confidence  of 
a  great  intercessor,  "  my  God  shall  supply  all 
your  need." 

4.  He  prayed  for  himself,  sometimes  with 
close  application  and  threefold  repetition,  the 
unanswered  prayer  betraying  by  its  very  men- 
tion what  a  commodity  he  possessed  of  answered 
prayers. 

And  not  only  did  he  pray  in  this  way  for 
himself,  but  he  often  turned  himself  into  a 
prayer  stone,  and  hung  himself  round  the  neck 
of  the  Church,  as  though  the  breastplate  were 
theirs  and  not  his.  "  Pray  for  me,"  he  said  ; 
"  I  hope  I  have  a  good  conscience  ;  I  want  to 
live  right."  ^  We  shall  succeed,  he  says  in 
another  place,  "  through  your  prayer  and  the 
supply  of  the  Spirit  of  Jesus."  "  Pray  for  me, 
that  I  may  speak  boldly,  as  I  ought  to  speak  "  ; 

'  The  quotation  is  from  Heb.  xiii.  18,  and  therefore  is 
not  to  be  taken  as  Paul's  direct  appeal.  Some  anonymous 
person  had  a  breastplate  of  the  same  pattern  ! 

3 


i8  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE 

my  courage  is  the  effluence  of  your  prayers,  and 
so  on. 

The  advantage  of  the  study  of  these  passages 
is  that  they  help  us  to  understand  how  thoroughly 
unsacerdotal  the  Apostle  was,  and  how  little  he 
was  disposed  to  unduly  differentiate  himself 
from  those  whom  he  served  and  loved. 

And  now  we  must  say  a  word  or  two  briefly 
about  our  own  breastplates,  and  the  particular 
intercessions  in  which  our  love  of  souls  involves 
us.  It  raises  in  our  minds  a  number  of  interest- 
ing questions,  such  as  the  following  :  How  big 
a  breastplate  can  you  wear  ?  How  many  souls 
can  you  carry  ?  Have  we  as  many  as  twelve 
that  we  never  forget  ?  Are  we  sure  of  one  that 
we  always  remember  I  And  amongst  those 
whose  remembrance  is  always  with  us,  of  how 
many  can  we  say  that  we  are  as  sure  of  being 
on  their  breastplates  as  they  are  of  being 
on  ours  ^ 

Questions  like  these  take  us  into  the  heart  of 
the  mystery  of  the  spiritual  commerce  between 
soul  and  soul,  and  between  souls  and  God. 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE  19 

It  is  a  great  thing  to  recognise  the  beauty  of 
the  soul,  and  to  have  people  to  pray  for  who 
are  given  us  by  God.  When  I  look  at  my 
own  breastplate  I  take  courage  and  thank  God. 
When  my  attention  is  drawn  to  the  grace  and 
sparkle  of  some  special  stone  that  was  once 
uncut  and  unpolished,  then  I  praise  God 
mightily  ! 

Here  is  one  that  I  carry  about — a  shy, 
changeable,  mysterious  jewel.  What  is  it.^* 
Where  did  you  pick  it  up  ?  It  is  an  opal  ; 
I  picked  it  up  in  crossing  a  certain  arid  stretch 
of  wilderness,  in  a  solitary  place  of  its  own  and 
of  mine. 

And  here  is  another,  akin  to  it — a  pearl. 
I  plunged  for  it  :  it  was  hidden  away  under 
the  forbidding  shells  of  hostility  and  mis- 
understanding. Prayer  makes  enemies  into 
friends,  and  final  friends,  who  will  not  return 
to  the  shells  from  which  they  have  been" 
extracted. 

And  here  is  another  stone,  a  sapphire  this. 
It  dropped  mysteriously  out  of  the  sky,  with 


20  AARON'S  BREASTPLATE     ' 

the  blue  of  the  heavens  still  clinging  to  it.  It 
lay  at  my  door,  to  be  either  trampled  on  or 
cherished.  It  pays  sometimes  to  look  down,  to 
condescend  to  people  of  low  estate  ! 

So  one  looks  from  jewel  to  jewel,  from  soul 
to  soul,  and  begins  to  understand  the  gift  of 
God  to  us  in  one  another.  May  I  have  this 
one  for  my  own,  wear  it,  keep  it,  have  it 
always  ?  How  delightful  it  must  be  to  have 
people  who  really  belong  to  us,  of  whom  we 
may  say,  in  our  little  measure,  what  our  Lord 
says  on  the  great  scale,  they  are  those  whom 
God  has  given  us,  ours  and  His  ! 

You  will  remember  that  Browning  brings 
this  meaning  out  of  the  similitude  of  the 
jewel,  as  contrasted  with  the  more  transient 
beauty  of  the  flower  : — 

"  Time  may  fray  the  flower-face 

***** 
Jewel  from  each  facet 
Flash  thy  laugh  at  Time." 

A  knowledge  of  the  meaning  and  scope  of 
intercessional  grace  will  help  us  to  understand 


AARON'S  BREASTPLATE'  21 

both  the  beauty  of  souls  and  our  ownership  in 
them.  We  must  always  think  nobly  of  the 
soul,  and  we  shall  only  be  able  to  do  this  as 
we  continue  in  prayer  and  abound  in  the  same 
with  thanksgiving. 

Here  is  a  little  verse  from  a  recently  re- 
covered poet  of  the  seventeenth  century,  named 
Traherne,  which  expresses  something  of  the 
same  thought  : 

"  Let's  prize  their  Souls,  and  let  them  be  our  Gems, 
Our  Temples  and  our  Diadems, 
Our  Brides,  our  Friends,  our  Fellow-Members,  Eyes, 
Hands,  Hearts  and  Souls,  our  Victories, 
And  Spoils  and  Trophies,  our  own  Joys  ! 
Compared  to  Souls,  all  else  are  Toys. 

O  Jesus,  let  them  be 
Such  unto  us  as  they  are  unto  Thee, 
Vessels  of  glory  and  felicity." 


ATARAXTA 


CHAPTER   II 

ATARAXIA 

(John  xiv.) 

T\77E    are    to     study    the     Christian    privi- 

^^      lege   which  is   involved  in  our  Lord's 

words   at   the  beginning  of  the    14th  chapter 

of  St.  John's    Gospel,  '*  Let    not    your    heart 

be   troubled,"    and   we  are   to    try   to   see   in 

what    way    the    injunction    or   commandment 

which  is  there  recorded  can  be  translated  into 

practical     every-day    experience.     For   I    need 

hardly  say  that  Christ's  commandments  are  all 

of  them  practical,   if  we  would  take  pains  to 

understand  them  rightly ;    that   they    are   not 

arbitrary  injunctions,  but  ethical  precepts  ;  and 

25 


26  ATARAXIA 

that,  however  remote  they  may  sometimes  seem 
to  be  from  the  horizon  of  our  ordinary  experi- 
ence, there  is  associated  with  the  injunction  an 
enabling  grace  which  makes  those  things  pos- 
sible to  us  which  we  should  by  nature  regard 
as  least  possible,  and  therefore  least  likely  to  be 
seriously  required. 

Now,  that  it  is  really  the  case  that  in  this 
passage  we  are  not  dealing  with  a  mere  casual 
remark,  only  one  degree  removed  from  the 
sympathetic  "  don't  worry "  of  a  concerned 
friend,  may  be  seen  in  various  ways  :  first  of 
all,  we  may  actually  detect  the  virtue  which 
underlies  the  quoted  commandment,  as  thus  : 
The  Greek  word  used  in   the  Fourth  Gospel 

{fxrj  TapaaaiaBoi  17  Kap^ia  u/iwi»)  is  a  verb  rapaaaM^ 

i.e,  tarassu  (disturb),  from  which  we  can  at 
once  form  a  noun,  which  shall  express  the  state 
of  disturbance  {taraxia),  and  then,  by  prefixing 
the  negative,  we  make  the  word  arapa^ia  (^Ata- 
raxia),  which  expresses  the  undisturbed  state  ; 
and  when  we  have  made  the  word,  we  shall  find 
that  it  is  already  a  recognised  virtue  among  the 


ATARAXIA  27 

Greek  philosophers,  who  knew  what  Ataraxia 
was,  not  merely  because  they  knew  Greek,  but 
because  they  had  studied,  on  one  side  or  another, 
the  very  virtue  which  the  word  expresses.  I 
propose  to  keep  this  word  Ataraxia^  because 
the  English  word  "undisturbedness"  is  too  long 
and  too  clumsy,  and  not  sufficiently  musical. 
If  it  sounds  a  little  foreign  at  first,  we  shall 
soon  be  at  home  with  it,  and  not  wish  to  trans- 
late it  nor  need  to  explain  it.  And  at  present 
we  simply  say  that  underneath  Christ's  words 
there  was  lurking  a  virtue,  with  a  very  musical 
name,  which  virtue  He  had  laid  up  for  them 
that  love  Him,  and  which  was  a  part  of  His 
own  spiritual  equipment.  We  will  come  back 
to  the  study  of  this  virtue  after  a  little  while. 
In  the  next  place,  you  will  notice  that  the 
commandment  of  our  Lord  is  repeated  a  little 
lower  down,  at  the  end  of  the  27th  verse, 
where  again  you  find  the  words,  "  Do  not 
let  your  heart  be  disturbed  nor  fearful " ; 
and  this  repetition  does  more  than  simply 
reaffirm  the  injunction  :  it  verifies  what  we  said 


28  ATARAXIA 

just  now  about  the  passage  being  a  musical 
passage,  for  here  the  discourse  has  moved  from 
what  we  call  in  music  a  keynote,  and  has  re- 
turned to  it  again.  And  this  movement  enables 
us  to  dissect  out  the  intervening  matter,  and 
edit  it  as  a  psalm,  a  psalm  of  the  undisturbed 
soul — as  really  a  psalm  as  some  of  those  in  the 
Psalter  which  address  themselves  to  the  various 
perplexities  and  distresses  of  spiritual  people 
who  are  on  the  way  from  trouble  to  trust  and 
from  anxiety  to  calm.  There  are  keynotes 
in  literary  composition,  just  as  there  are  in 
music  ;  we  expect  them  especially  in  psalms, 
which  are  hardly  removed  from  musical  com- 
positions properly  so  called.  We  are  not  sur- 
prised, for  instance,  to  find  that  the  46th  Psalm 
which  opens  so  splendidly  with — 

"  God  is  our  refuge  and  strength, 
A  very  present  help  in  time  of  trouble," 

should  end  with — 

'^The  Lord  of  Hosts  is  with  us  ; 
The  God  of  Jacob  is  our  refuge  "  ; 


ATARAXIA  29 

because  the  word  "  refuge  "  is  clearly  the  key- 
word to  that  passage. 

In  the  same  way,  when  we  are  studying  the 
great  consecration  psalm  of  some  unknown 
but  deeply-taught  person,  near  the  end  of  the 
Psalter  (I  mean  the  139th  Psalm),  even  a 
merely  literary  person,  with  small  taste  for 
music,  can  understand  the  rhythmical  motion, 
which  takes  us  from — 

"  O    Lord,  Thou    hast    searched    me,  and 
known  me," 
to— 

"  Search  me,  O  God,  and  know  my  heart ; 
try  me,  and  know  my  ways." 

Or,  to  take  a  simpler  instance,  we  might  look 
at  the  103rd  Psalm,  whose  opening  strain  is — 

"  Bless  the  Lord,  O  my  soul," 
and  watch  the  way  in  which  the  writer  (again 
a  musical  soul,  if  any)  is  working  towards  his 
keynote  at  the  end  of  the  psalm,  and  gathering 
back  the  praise  of  God,  from  worlds  above  and 
worlds  around,  into  the  depths  of  his  own 
experience — 


30  ATARAXIA 

"Bless  the  Lord,  ye  His  angels, 
Bless  the  Lord,  ye  His  ministers. 
Bless  the  Lord,  all  His  works, 
Bless  the  Lord,  O  my  soul." 
So  that  we  need    not    be    surprised  to  find  a 
musical  element,  as  well  as  an  added  emphasis, 
in  the  repetition  of   the  commandment  "  Let 
not  your  heart  be   troubled."     Musical  !  yes, 
certainly   musical,  as    Christ's   own    heart   was 
musical,  returning  from  a  keynote  of  its  own, 
such  as  that  in  John  i.  i ,  "  The  Word  was  with 
God,"    and    moving    through    all   varieties   of 
resolved  discords,  until  it  comes  at  last  to  the 
place  where  *'  He    ascends    up  where  He  was 
before."     Musical !    yes,   certainly  musical,   as 
the  life  of  every  true  believer  is  musical  which, 
beginning   with    a    "  strange    warmth    at    the 
heart,"  does  not  end  with   "a  strange  chill" 
for  its  last  chapter. 

And  now  let  us  return  to  the  virtue  which 
we  are  studying,  the  virtue  of  Ataraxia. 

From  the  Greek  point  of  view,  it  was  ap- 
proached from  two  directions,  and  studied  in 


ATARAXIA  31 

two  very  different  regards  :  first,  as  a  descrip- 
tion of  God,  second  as  the  character  of  the  wise 
man,  the  truly  royal  person.  The  first  is  the 
point  of  view  of  the  Epicureans,  the  second 
(modified  as  airaSeia,  or,  as  we  say,  "  apathy") 
of  the  Stoics.  The  first  describes  Ataraxia  as 
the  Peace  of  God,  the  second  as  the  Peace 
of  the  Soul  that  follows  God.  And  I  think 
we  may  see  that,  when  we  have  stated  the 
matter  in  that  way,  we  have  a  point  of  contact 
between  the  Christian  seeker  after  God,  and 
the  seekers  after  God  elsewhere.  The  seeker 
after  God  is  not  to  be  despised  ;  as  Cromwell 
said,  in  writing  to  one  of  his  daughters  about 
a  sister  of  hers,  who  had  joined  the  sect  of 
the  Seekers,  "  I  hear  that  your  sister  has  joined 
the  Seekers  ;  it  is  the  next  best  sect  to  being 
a  Finder."  I  think  it  must  have  been  a  great 
trial  to  Cromwell,  who  was  far  removed  from 
fanaticism  himself,  to  have  his  daughter  go 
astray  like  that ;  but  the  comment  he  makes 
shows  his  greatness  :  "  nexf  best  sect  to  being 
a  Finder  ! "     That  is  true   in  Greece  as  well 


32  ATARAXIA 

as  in  England,  amongst  philosophers  as  well  as 
Puritans.  And  in  regard  to  the  definitions 
which  Epicurean  and  Stoic  may  give  of  the 
Ataraxia  of  their  gods  or  wise  men,  the  Chris- 
tian formulae  embrace  theirs,  for  they  define 
Christian  experience  on  one  side  as  *'  the 
peace  of  God,"  with  God  for  "  the  very 
God  of  Peace,"  and  on  the  other  side  repre- 
sent Christian  attainment  as  an  experi- 
mental *'  peace  which  passes  understanding 
and  keeps  the  heart  and  mind  stayed  on 
Christ." 

It  is  related  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  that, 
when  Paul  came  to  Athens,  he  had  reasonings 
with  both  Stoics  and  Epicureans,  and  that  they 
called  him  by  a  slang  name  ;  they  said  he  was  a 
Spermologos^  i.e.,  "  a  picker-up  of  Learning's 
crumbs."  We  have  only  a  rapid  summary  of 
what  passed  between  them  ;  it  implies  that  they 
had  something  in  common,  but  were  not  dis- 
posed to  treat  the  matter  sympathetically  ;  but 
it  is  lawful  to  conjecture  that,  whatever  were 
the  causes  which  provoked  their  contempt  and 


ATARAXIA  33 

disdain,  if  he  had  ventured  on  anything  like 
a  discourse  of  Ataraxia,  /.<?.,  if  he  had  preached 
to  them  the  "  God  of  Peace  "  and  "  the  peace 
of  God,"  each  side  of  the  philosophic  audience 
might  have  found  something  in  the  strange 
new  preacher  that  was  not  wholly  described 
under  the  head  of  "  some  new  thing,  such  as 
Athenians  love,  or  plagiarised  old  thing,  such  as 
Athenians  despise."  Perhaps  they  might  not 
have  called  him  a  Spermologos  at  all.  And 
whatever  may  be  the  case  with  the  philoso- 
phers, we  may  be  sure  that  the  mystics  of  all 
ages  would  understand  his  speech  about  the 
"  peace  of  God,"  because  they  might  almost  be 
defined  as  a  people  whose  ultimate  goal  is  a 
deep  peace,  and  for  whom  there  is  "  no  joy  but 
calm." 

It  will  not  be  supposed  that  we  are  trying 
to  make  out  a  better  case  for  Epicureans  and 
Stoics  than  the  study  of  their  lives  and  writings 
would  warrant;  we  know  the  weakness  of  either 
school,  and  its  limitations  and  its  decline ;  either 
name  hgs  syfFered  from  those  who  bore  it,  as 

4 


34  ATARAX  I A 

also  has  the  Christian  name  ;  and  the  modern 
connotation  of  either  name  is  removed  a  good 
distance  from  either  early  pagan  or  primitive 
Christian  virtue.  But  judge  them  by  their  best, 
and  they  are  not  so  far  away  that  they  cannot 
be  made  connection  with.  Epicureanism  does 
not,  indeed,  make  its  God  of  Peace  either 
worshipful  or  winsome.  But  it  has  implicitly 
a  God  of  Peace.  It  is  true  that  He  does 
not  want  us,  and  we  should  waste  time  in 
appealing  to  Him.  You  remember  the  Epi- 
curean sketch  in  "The  Lotus-Eaters"  of 
Tennyson  : — 

"  For  they  lie    beside    their    nectar,  and  the  bolts  are 

hurled 
Far  below  them    in    the  valleys,  and  the  clouds  are 

lightly  curled 
Round  their  golden  houses,  girdled  with  the  gleaming 

worlds  ; 
Where    they   smile    in    secret,    looking   over   wasted 

lands, 
Blight  and    famine,    plague    and    earthquake,  roaring 

deeps  and  fiery  sands. 
Clanging  fights  and  flaming  towns,  and  sinking  ships 

and  praying  hands." 


ATARAXIA  35 

There  is  still  a  good  distance  between  Chris- 
tianity as  a  religion  of  the  Finder,  and  the 
"  next  best  sect,"  is  there  not  ?  But  we  will 
not  spend  more  time  on  the  Epicureans  ;  they 
have  probably  been  a  good  deal  misunderstood  ; 
their  judgment,  however,  of  the  nature  of  God, 
has  been  set  at  naught  by  the  Incarnation. 
And  the  same  thing  is  true  of  the  Stoics,  whose 
Ataraxia  tended  to  mere  apathy^  which  the 
Christian  variety  does  not. 

Returning  to  the  question  of  experimental 
peace,  such  as  is  involved  in  the  state  of 
Ataraxia,  it  will  be  seen  that  this  is  one  of  the 
points  upon  which  the  Scriptures  become  hyper- 
bolic, whether  Old  Testament  Scriptures  or 
New  Testament  Scriptures.  Thus  peace  is 
said  to  be  perfect,  for  "Thou  wilt  keep  him 
in  peace,  in  peace,  whose  mind  is  stayed  on 
Thee,  because  he  trusteth  in  Thee  "  ;  it  is  said 
to  flow  like  a  river,  for  "  Oh  that  thou  hadst 
hearkened  to  My  commandments  !  then  had  thy 
peace  been  like  a  river  "  ;  and  it  is  said  to  be 
amongst  those  things  that  exceed   the  ken  of 


36  ATARAXIA 

angels  or  men,  for  "  the  peace  of  God  exceeds 
all  understanding." 

Now,  when  the  Scriptures  become  hyper- 
bolical, we  must  either  become  believing  or 
apologetic.  We  have  our  choice  :  it  is  too 
good  to  be  false,  or  it  is  too  good  to  be  exactly 
true.  The  saints  say  the  first,  the  doubters 
subscribe  to  the  second.  But  the  saints  have 
always  this  quality,  that,  having  realised  that 
the  life  which  they  are  working  out  has  become 
musical  both  God-ward  and  man-ward,  they  are 
resolutely  set  to  take  the  top  notes  of  the  music, 
even  though  at  first  they  may  come  nearer 
screaming  than  singing.  Even  the  hyperboles 
of  Scripture  turn  out  to  be  reasonable  upon 
a  closer  scrutiny  :  "  It  ought  to  be  true,  even  if 
it  isn't,"  is  one  of  our  early  criticisms  of  Christ's 
promises  ;  but  "  It  ought  to  be,  and  therefore  it 
is,"  is  the  later  and  the  reasonable  view. 

Why  should  we  say  that  it  is  of  the  nature  of 
hyperbole  to  describe  human  experience,  when 
turned  into  channels  of  Christian  love  and  faith, 
as  flowing  like  a  river  ;  is  it  necessarily  hyper- 


ATARAX  I A  37 

bolical  to  be  continuous  or  to  increase  ?  If  the 
continuity  were  broken,  where  were  the  river  ? 
If  the  depth  were  diminishing  as  one  moved 
seaward,  we  might  suspect  the  flood  was  going 
to  dry  up  ;  but  the  real  rivers  don't  do  that. 
Or  if  the  river  were  to  lose  perceptible  flow, 
and  be  like  the  river  Cam,  of  which  a  clever 
undergraduate  made  the  description  that  "in 
that  place  there  is  a  river  which  runneth  neither 
to  the  East  nor  to  the  West,  but  remaineth  always 
in  one  place,"  we  might  lawfully  transfer  it 
from  the  category  of  rivers  to  that  of  canals  ; 
or  if  the  stream  were  to  be  like  the  Sabbatic 
river,  of  which  Josephus  speaks,  which  ran  only 
once  a  week,  or  stopped  once  a  week  (I  am  not 
sure  which),  out  of  respect  for  God  and  Moses, 
we  might  reasonably  say  that  it  was  not  a  river, 
but  could  perhaps  be  classified  as  a  geyser. 
The  apparent  hyperbole  of  the  Scripture  simili- 
tude protects  us  from  believing  that  Christian 
peace  is  intermittent,  that  it  dries  up,  or  stops 
short,  or  works  only  on  Sunday,  or  anything 
that  implies  imperfect  fellowship   between  the 


38  ATARAXIA 

believer  and  his  Indweller.  When  we  think 
it  is  going  to  dry  up  we  are  as  unreasonable  as 
Horace's  rustic  who  stood  on  the  bank  of  the 
stream,  waiting  for  it  to  flow  by,  that  he  might 
be  able  to  cross — 

"  Rusticus  expectat,  dum  defluat  amnis,  at  ille 
Labitur  et  labetur  in  omne  volubilis  aevum." 

As  you  can  hear  the  river  rolling  in  that  last 
verse,  there  is  no  need  for  me  to  translate  the 
passage. 

Now,  what  is  the  name  of  this  river  which 
we  have  been  describing  ?  Well,  it  is  like  many 
rivers  on  the  map,  it  changes  its  name  from 
district  to  district  ;  but  when  you  get  past  the 
cataracts,  the  name  of  the  river  is  Ataraxia,  and 
the  country  is  very  fertile  on  both  sides  of  it  ; 
and  the  open  sea,  which  is  its  home,  is  not  very 
far  ahead  of  it. 

Hyperbole  on  the  experimental  side  is  one 
of  the  characteristics  of  a  Divine  revelation  ; 
while  it  may  perhaps  be  true,  as  some  one  said, 
that  "less  grace  would  find  an  easier  entrance 


ATARAX  I A  39 

into  our  hearts,"  we  should  hardly  wish  to  erase 
the  words  "  He  giveth  more  grace  "  from  the 
Scriptures,  or  to  subtract  from  their  meaning, 
which  is  only  an  underhand  attempt  at  erasure. 
Let  God  promise  like  God,  and  do  you  believe 
like  a  child  of  God.  Make  a  collection  of  the 
hyperbolic  promises  of  God,  and  you  have  the 
materials  for  the  dogmatic  statement  of  a  full 
salvation  ;  set  them  down: — 

"  I  will  never  leave  thee,  never  forsake  thee." 
*'  Neither  height  nor  depth,  nor  any  other 
creature  shall  be  able  to  separate  us." 
*'  All  things  are  yours,  ye  are  Christ's." 
"  The  very  hairs  of  your  head  are  numbered." 
"  May  be  strong  to  grasp  with  all  saints  the 
length  and  breadth  and  height,  and  to  know." 

Write  them  down,  study  them,  believe  them, 
absorb  them  ;  "  do  not  let  your  heart  be  dis- 
turbed, neither  let  it  be  fearful." 

We  will  now  see  if  we  can  find  out  some 
of  the  characteristics  of  the  undisturbed  soul 
and  the  undisturbed  state. 

We  shall  fix  the  matter  in  our  mind  by  call- 


40  ATARAXIA 

ing  this  passage  which  we  have  carved  out  of 
the  14th  of  John  a  Psalm  of  Jesus.  There  are 
bits  of  dialogue  interwoven  in  it,  but  they  do 
not  disturb  the  motion  of  the  music.  And  our 
Lord  is  our  Conductor  in  song  as  He  is  our 
leader  in  prayer.  He  spun  this  quiet  song  out 
of  the  inmost  knowledge  of  His  own  soul  ;  the 
warp  and  the  woof  of  it  were  the  two  natures 
that  went  to  make  the  Sonship.  Christ's  song- 
fulness  and  calmness  may  be  communicated  to 
us  just  as  His  prayerfulness  ;  and  if  disciples, 
overhearing  Him  when  He  was  on  His  knees, 
said,  "  Lord,  teach  us  to  pray,"  and  so  were 
taught,  in  the  same  way,  when  the  saints  detect 
His  calmness  and  His  brave  cheer,  they  say, 
*'  Lord,  teach  us  to  sing  the  psalm  of  Thy 
Ataraxia,"  and  they  are  taught  it  ;  and  by 
making  this  communication  to  them  He  shows 
them  the  Father. 

For  what  was  His  own  experience  ?  The 
answer  is  that  it  was  a  deep  sea,  the  calm  of 
whose  depths  controlled  its  surface  ;  or  if  ex- 
terior perturbations  arose,  they  did  not  affect 


ATARAXIA  41 

the   depth.      Here   are   some   lines   that    may 
describe  that  depth  : — 

"  Down  where  the  waves  are  still,  the  sea  shines  clear. 
***** 

Hither  shall  come  no  further  sacrifice, 
Never  again  the  anguished  clutch  at  life. 
Never  again  great  Love  and  Death  at  strife. 
He  who  hath  suffered  all  need  fear  no  more, 
^uict  his  portion   now,  for  evermore." 

In  a  certain  sense  these  experiences  are 
common  property  between  the  saints  and  their 
Lord,  but  they  are  theirs  because  bestowed  and 
communicated  by  Him.  And  when  we  say  that 
we  must  "  make  the  surface  as  the  depth,"  and 
that  this  is  Ataraxia,  it  is  presupposed  that  the 
depth  exists.  The  Scriptures  describe  it  under 
the  term  of  a  life  hid  with  Christ  in  God. 
That  is  our  depth.  Ataraxia  is  only  one 
characteristic  of  the  mystical  union  according 
'^  to  which  the  outward  life  in  the  world  is 
conformed  to  an  inward  life  with  God. 

If  we  are  to  make  the  surface  like  the  depths 
we  may  put  it  another  way,  and  say  that  we 


42  ATARAXIA 

are  to  make  the  open  sea  like  the  harbour.  Faber 
uses  this  figure  in  one  of  his  hymns  on  the 
greatness  of  God,  and  says : — 

"Out  on  that  sea  we  are  in  harbour  still 
And  scarce  advert  to  winds  and  tides, 
Like  ships  that  ride  at  anchor,  with  the  waves 
Flapping  against  their  sides." 

He  means  that  the  ship  he  sails  in  is  a  steady 
ship,  as  steady  in  an  open  sea  as  when  anchored 
in  harbour  ;  it  is  a  very  steady  ship,  the  good 
ship  Ataraxia.  The  goodness  and  greatness  of 
God,  when  understood,  produce  steadiness  and 
induce  calm.     As  Faber  says  elsewhere  : — 

"  Then  on  Thy  greatness  I  will  lay  me  down, 
Already  life  is  heaven  to  me  ! 
No  cradled  child  more  softly  lies  than  I — 
Come  soon,  eternity  !  " 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  eternity  is  come  already. 

I  was  once  staying  with  some  friends  in  the 
city  of  Wilmington,  Delaware,  and  the  room  in 
which  they  put  the  pilgrim  to  sleep  was  adorned 
with  a  bed   coverlet   made  out   of  old  brown 


ATARAXIA  43 

linen  which  had  been  spun  in  the  old  days,  in 
some  log  house  of  what  was  then  the  frontier, 
by  the  grandmother  of  the  lady  of  the  house. 
Over  it  she  had  worked  with  her  needle  lines 
from  Mrs.  Browning  to  the  following  effect : — 

"God's  greatness 
Flows  around  our  incompleteness, 
Round  our  restlessness  His  rest." 

When  I  came  down  in  the  morning  they  asked 
me  how  I  had  slept,  and  my  answer  was, 
"  How  could  I  have  slept  other  than  well 
with  such  a  text  as  that  on  top  of  me  ?  "  The 
open  sea  was  like  the  harbour  that  night.  A 
word  through  Mrs.  Browning  had  said  "  Peace, 
be  still." 

An  undisturbed  soul  is  a  beautiful  thing, 
whether  waking  or  sleeping — for,  whether  we 
wake  or  sleep,  we  live  together  with  Him. 
When  we  pray,  "  Let  the  beauty  of  the  Lord 
our  God  be  upon  us,"  this  is  one  of  the  things 
we  are  praying  for  ;  without  it  we  cannot  be 
made  perfect. 


44  ATARAX  I A 

We  have  known  some  souls  of  this  class  ; 
they  have  not  been  recluses,  living  in  a  region 
from  which  disturbance  is  artificially  excluded  ; 
they  have  been  men  and  women,  busy  in  a 
busy  world.  I  knew  one  of  them,  since  gone 
to  his  rest,  who  carried  on  an  active  service  for 
his  Master  in  the  busiest  of  all  cities,  and  who 
selected  for  himself  a  telegraphic  address  which 
might  stand  at  the  head  of  his  notepaper. 
What  do  you  think  this  busy  man's  address 
was  ?     It  was  "this  : — 

"  Undisturbed,  London." 

And  it  always  found  him  at  home — that  is  to 
say,  in  God — so  far  as  I  could  judge  of  his 
dwelling-place  in  the  days  when  I  knew  him, 
before  he  had  run  out  his  leasehold  in  the 
Church  militant  and  taken  up  his  freehold  in 
the  Church  triumphant.  Such  an  one,  living 
at  such  an  address,  verifies  the  truth  of  the 
Scripture  which  says  of  the  good  man  that — 

*'  He  shall  not  be  afraid  of  evil  tidings. 
His  heart  is  fixed,  trusting  in  the  Lord." 


ATARAXIA  45 

But  perhaps  in  those  days  they  had  no  black- 
edged  letters  and  no  telegrams.  Whatever  they 
had,  they  had  bad  news.  I  admit  that  the  tele- 
gram, however,  as  a  test  of  the  state.  If  we 
had  that  medical  instrument  called  a  sphygmo- 
graph  attached  to  our  pulse,  most  of  us  would 
show  a  rise  in  the  index  if  a  telegram  came 
into  our  hands.  It  is  certainly  so,  and  nothing 
but  persistent  communion  with  God  will  cure  it. 
A  man  was  attending  one  of  the  great  reli- 
gious gatherings  in  Western  America  ;  he  was 
a  farmer,  several  hundreds  of  miles  from  home, 
and  when  the  spiritual  life  of  the  meetings  was 
at  its  height  he  received  a  telegram,  saying, 
"The  grasshoppers  are  eating  your  corn." 
What  was  he  to  do.f*  He  could  not  tele- 
graph back  to  the  grasshoppers  to  stop  eating 
the  corn  ;  he  could  not  get  back  himself  and 
stop  them.  So  he  said  :  "  If  my  Father  wishes 
to  feed  His  grasshoppers  on  His  corn,  I  have 
nothing  to  say  to  it."  Was  that  Stoicism 
or  Fatalism  }  Neither  of  these  :  it  was  just 
Ataraxia. 


46  ATARAX  I A 

I  have  said  nothing  in  what  precedes  with 
regard  to  the  historical  setting  in  which  this 
jewel  of  Christ's  teaching  is  found.  We  must 
not  drive  sequence  too  hard,  and  it  is  possible 
that  the  instinct  which  places  a  chapter  division 
at  the  point  where  "  Let  not  your  heart  be 
troubled  "  stands  is  one  which  internal  evidence 
may  justify.  On  the  other  hand,  it  may  be 
argued,  from  purely  spiritual  grounds,  that  it 
is  right  to  place  the  words  in  close  sequence 
with  the  warning  to  Peter,  so  as  to  read  the 
injunction  to  Ataraxia  into  a  soul  that  was 
already,  or  would  be  presently,  in  a  state  ot 
deep  trouble.  I  In  that  case  the  medicine  would 
have  been  placed  near  the  disease  ;  and  it  can 
hardly  be  doubted  that  Ataraxia  is  a  genuine 

^  The  objection  has  been  made  that  in  that  case  our 
Lord  would  not  have  used  the  plural  in  "  Let  not  your 
hearts  be  troubled  ;  believe  ye  in  God,"  &c.  But  this 
seems  not  to  allow  sufficiently  for  the  disturbance  which 
was  affecting  the  whole  of  the  apostolic  company  whose 
companionship  with  Peter  is  intimated  in  Mark  xiv.  31  by 
the  words  "  And  so  said  they  all  in  like  manner."  Per- 
haps this  reference  may  justify  the  use  of  the  plural  in 
John  xiv.  I. 


A  TAR  AX  I A  47 

prophylactic  in  the  spiritual  pharmacopoeia, 
when  we  consider  the  language  of  St.  Paul  to 
the  PhiJippians  to  the  effect  that  "  the  peace  of 
God  shall  garrison  your  hearts."  So  we  may 
say,  if  we  please,  that  our  Lord  mixed  this 
draught  for  Peter  and  held  it  out  for  him  to 
drink,  and  that  it  was  the  proper  antidote  for 
his  falling-sickness.  Interior  calmness  means 
interior  and  exterior  strength. 

Whether  we  are  right  or  not  in  our  interpre- 
tation of  the  sequence  in  the  Fourth  Gospel,  we 
can  hardly  be  wrong  in  the  conclusion  to  which 
our  study  pointed  us.  I  find  the  same  truth 
brought  out  in  a  striking  passage  in  a  book 
which  I  read  some  years  since,  called  "  The 
Gospel  of  the  Nineteenth  Century."  I  don't 
like  the  title  of  the  book,  and  the  less  because 
we  are  already  in  the  twentieth  century.  But 
here  is  the  passage  to  which  I  refer  : — 

"  True  calmness  is  the  accompaniment  of 
steadfastness  of  soul.  It  is  the  offspring  of  per- 
fect trust  in  God.     There   is  a  beautiful  figure 


48  ATARAXIA 

employed  in  the  Apocalypse  to  denote  the  calm- 
ness of  the  soul  which  arises  from  the  conscious- 
ness of  God's  presence.  Before  the  throne  there 
was  a  sea  of  glass  like  unto  crystal.  The  idea 
conveyed  to  our  minds  by  this  emblem  is  that  of 
a  sea,  not  of  glass,  but  like  glass,  a  sea  the  glassy 
surface  of  whose  waters  is  ruffled  by  not  so 
much  as  a  passing  breeze,  and  whose  crystal 
depths  are  lit  up  with  sunshine,  a  sea  smooth 
and  clear  as  crystal.  The  beauty  of  the  emblem 
is  that  it  combines  the  most  restless,  unstable 
thing  in  nature  with  the  idea  of  perfect  repose 
and  tranquillity.  The  sea  in  its  restlessness  is 
a  true  likeness  of  the  human  heart.  Every 
breath  of  wind  disturbs  the  one,  every  breath 
of  adversity  troubles  the  other.  But  there  is 
something  which  can  bring  perfect  repose  to 
the  soul,  the  presence  of  God.  This  is  the 
truth  which  is  taught  by  this  sublime  image  of 
the  sea  like  glass  before  the  throne.  It  repre- 
sents the  calm  of  a  soul  which  dwells  in  the 
presence  of  God.  We  think  of  heaven  as 
calm  because  it  is  out  of  reach  of  the  storms  of 


ATARAXIA  49 

earth,  but  this  is  not  the  idea  conveyed  by  the 
vision.  The  heaven  which  it  reveals  is  a  heaven 
on  earth.  The  scene  of  the  Apocalypse  is  laid, 
not  in  some  far-ofF  sphere,  some  fabled  Ely- 
sium, but  here  on  earth.  Heaven  is  within 
the  good  man's  heart.  The  sea  which  is  before 
the  throne  is  smooth  and  clear  as  crystal,  not 
because  it  is  remote  from  earthly  storms,  but 
because  the  Spirit  of  God  moves  upon  the  face 
of  the  waters." 

I  must  confess  that  I  do  not  see  why  this 
beautiful  place  of  mystical  exegesis  should  be 
labelled  so  unfortunately  as  "  Gospel  of  the 
Nineteenth  Century  "  ;  that  must  have  been  a 
publisher's  title,  one  would  think.  The  saints 
have  nothing  to  do  with  the  nineteenth  century  ; 
they  live  in  Him  who  is  called  Yesterday, 
To-day,  and  For  Ever. 


MARY   AND   MARTHA 


CHAPTER   III 


MARY    AND    MARTHA 


OOME  one  was  recently  remarking  to  me 
^^  that  it  was  not  commonly  realised  how 
many  sermons  had  been  preached  on  the  subject 
of  Martha  and  her  sister  Mary  ;  nor,  it  might 
be  added,  how  much  heat  had  been  developed 
by  the  sermons,  especially  amongst  the  feminine 
part  of  the  community.  Every  revival  of 
religion,  every  mystical  movement,  brings  these 
two  sisters  on  to  the  screen  of  the  Gospel,  and 
when  they  are  thus  projected  it  is  impossible 
to  avoid  the  question,  "  Which  of  the  two,  do 
you  think,  loved  the  Lord  best  ?  "  with  perhaps 
the  added  and  less  worthy  question,  "Which 
of  them  do  you  like  best  ?  "     And  under  either 

53 


54  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

head  the  judgment  of  the  Church  has  been  a 
divided  one.  I  do  not  mean  that  all  references 
to  the  subject  are  polarised  references ;  when, 
for  instance,  Milton  informs  one  of  his  young 
lady  friends  that — 

"  The  better  part  with  Mary  and  with  Ruth 
Thou   chosen  hast," 

he  was  as  little  reflecting  upon  the  fact  that 
Mary  had  a  sister  as  upon  the  previous  husband 
whom  Ruth  was  trying  to  improve  upon.  But, 
on  the  other  hand,  when  Charles  Wesley  was 
writing  the  splendid  hymn — 

"  O  Love  Divine,  how  sweet  Thou  art  !  " 

especially  the  verse — 

"  Oh  that  I  could  for  ever  sit 
With  Mary  at  the  Master's  feet  !  " ' 


*  Some  of  our  modern  hymn-books  omit  this  verse  for 
sentimental  reasons,  or  mutilate  it  :  their  judgment  is 
faulty  :  it  was,  perhaps,  right  to  remove  a  verse  which 
followed  about  "  beloved  John,"  but  this  verse  is  the 
highest    point  of  the   hymn   and  must   not  be  removed. 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  55 

he  was  writing  at  a  time  when  evangelical  piety 
was  definitely  engaged  in  dissecting  the  two 
sisters,  to  find  out  which  of  them  had  the  larger 
and  the  warmer  heart.  For  the  question  comes 
up  in  other  Methodist  hymns,  especially  in  the 
form  of  the  eirenicon  which  suggests  that  the 
two  sisters  might  be  compounded  into  a  single 
soul  that  should  find  no  contradiction  between 
the  kitchen  of  carefulness  and  the  doorstep  of 
delight :  thus  we  are  admonished  to — 

"  Serve  with  careful  Martha's  hands 
And  Mary's  loving  heart  !  " 

or,  in  a  less  pronounced  and  personal  statement, 
are  taught  to  say — 

"  My  hands  are  but  engaged  below, 
My  heart  is  still  with  Thee." 

But  whatever  attention  the  evangelicals  may 
have  paid  to  Mary  and  her  sister  Martha,  that 
is  as  nothing  to  the  attention  which  has  been 
bestowed   upon  them    by  writers   of   mystical 


56  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

divinity,  in  whose  systems  Mary  stands  for 
what  they  call  the  Contemplative  Life  and 
iVIartha  for  the  Active  Life. 

If,  for  instance,  you  were  to  turn  to  Madame 
Guyon's  Commentaries  upon  the  interior  sense 
of  the  Scriptures,  you  would  find  her  discours- 
ing something  like  this  :  — 

"  Martha  receives  Jesus  into  her  house  ;  that 
is  as  much  as  the  active  life  can  attain  to. 
But  Mary,  who  signifies  the  contemplative  life, 
was  seated.  That  '  being  seated  '  expresses  the 
repose  of  her  contemplation  ;  in  that  sacred  rest 
she  does  nothing  but  listen  to  the  voice  of  her 
dear  Master,  who  teaches,  nourishes,  and 
quickens  her  with  His  own  word.  Oh !  Mary, 
happy  Mary,  to  hear  that  word  !  It  makes 
itself  heard  because  you  put  yourself  in  a  state 
to  hear  it  :  you  listened  for  it,  and  you  rested 
in  that  silence  and  that  peace  without  which  it 
is  not  possible  to  hear  that  word  which  is  heard 
only  in  heart-silence  !  " 

She  continues  her  commentary  with  an  appeal 
to  those  who  are  opposing  the  doctrine  of  the 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  57 

Inward  Way.  She  tells  them  that  this  single 
passage  from  the  Gospel  ought  to  convince  them 
that  they  are  wrong.  The  whole  doctrine  of  the 
Scriptures  is  summed  up  in  these  words  of  the 
Gospel  of  Luke  which  teaches  us  to  leave 
Multiplicity  and  Care  and  Anxiety  and  Undue 
Concern,  and  to  enter  into  Simplicity  and  Unity 
of  Spirit  and  Abandonment,  and  Surrender  and 
Peace  and  Tranquillity  and  Silence  ;  to  leave  the 
multiplied  worries  of  action,  and  to  enter  into 
the  repose  of  contemplation. 

She  then  points  out  that  although  one  has  to 
abandon  the  Active  Life  for  the  Contemplative, 
the  ultimate  intention  is  their  reunion,  according 
to  which  we  shall  enter  into  exterior  works 
without  losing  interior  peace.  All  the  trouble 
arises  from  having  sought  after  two  states 
which  ought  to  be  united  in  a  single  experience. 
And  then  she  concludes  her  brief  comments  by 
saying  that  "  the  Truth  assures  us  that  there  is 
only  one  thing  necessary  and  Mary  has  chosen 
it.  What  has  Mary  chosen  ^  To  listen  to 
God  and  rest  in  Him.     That  is  the  one  thing 


58  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

needful,  to  be  attentive  to  Him,  this  is  what 
we  are  to  choose.  And,  oh !  inconceivable  bless- 
ing, he  who  makes  the  choice  has  the  added 
gain  that  no  one  takes  it  from  him.  No  one 
can  plunder  so  great  a  blessing  from  the  man 
who  has  it :  it  is  given  him  in  the  interior 
depth,  and  no  man  can  pluck  it  up.  That  is 
why  St.  Paul  said,  '  Neither  height  nor  depth 
.  .  .  shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from  the 
love  of  God  in  Christ  Jesus,'  grounded  and 
established  in  Him,  and  apart  from  all 
merits  of  the  Creature " ;  so  Madame  Guyon 
adds  the  last  verse  of  the  8th  of  Romans 
as  a  pendant  to  the  last  verse  of  the  loth 
of  Luke,  and  they  certainly  seem  to  belong 
together. 

She  discusses  the  same  problem  in  the  little 
book  called  "  The  Short  Method  of  Prayer," 
where  a  special  section  is  given  to  the  question 
of  the  relation  of  the  Human  Activity  to  the 
Divine  Life  ;  and  she  defends  herself  vigorously 
against  the  charge  of  prohibiting  some  from 
active  service,  using  often  the  very  same  words 


-   MARY  AND   MARTHA  59 

that  we  noted  above  from  her  Commentaries  : 
*'  Instead,  therefore,  of  prohibiting  activity, 
we  enjoin  it  :  but  in  absolute  dependence  on 
the  Spirit  of  God,  that  His  activity  may  take 
the  place  of  our  own." 

This  can  only  be  effected  by  the  concurrence 
of  the  creature  ;  and  this  concurrence  can  only 
be  yielded  by  moderating  and  restraining  our 
own  activity,  that  the  activity  of  God  may 
gradually  gain  the  ascendency,  and  finally 
absorb  all  that  is  ours,  as  distinguishable 
from  it. 

"Jesus  Christ  hath  exemplified  this  in  the 
Gospel.  Martha  did  what  was  right,  but  be- 
cause she  did  it  in  her  own  spirit,  Christ 
rebuked  her.  The  spirit  of  man  is  restless  and 
turbulent ;  for  which  reason  it  does  little, 
though  it  would  appear  to  do  much.  '  Martha,' 
saith  Christ,  '  thou  art  careful,  and  troubled 
about  many  things  ;  but  one  thing  is  needful  ; 
and  Mary  hath  chosen  that  good  part,  which 
shall  not  be  taken  away  from  her.'  And  what 
was  it  that  Mary  had  chosen .?     Repose,  tran- 


6o  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

quillity,  and  peace.  She  apparently  ceased  to 
act,  that  the  Spirit  of  Christ  might  act  in  her  ; 
she  ceased  to  live,  that  Christ  might  be  her 
Life." 

So  much  having  been  said  with  regard  to 
Madame  Guyon  and  her  mystical  interpretation 
of  Martha  and  Mary,  we  go  on  to  observe  that 
the  allegory  of  the  Contemplative  and  Active 
Life  furnished  by  the  two  sisters  is  not  her  own 
invention,  but  is  a  commonplace  of  the  spiritual 
teachers  of  the  Church.  Suppose  we  try  and 
find  out  what  St.  Bernard  would  think  about  it. 
We  remember  that  St.  Bernard  is  not  only  a 
monk,  but  a  statesman,  a  man  out  of  the  world 
and  very  much  in  it.  So  we  should  expect  that 
he  will  speak  well  both  of  Mary  and  Martha, 
and  will  try  to  combine  their  excellences  in  a 
sum  total  of  Christian  virtue,  just  as  Wesley's 
hymn  tells  us  to  do  and  as  Madame  Guyon's 
explanation  also  suggests. 

For  example,  when  he  preaches  on  the 
Canticles,  and  comes  to  the  text  where  the 
Bridegroom   says,    "  How   beautiful     are    thy 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  6i 

cheeks,  like  the  cheeks  of  a  turtle  dove  !  "  ^ 
he  has  to  show  what  are  meant  by  the  cheeks  of 
a  pious  soul,  how  Intention  as  he  calls  it  is  the 
whole  face,  the  matter  upon  which  we  are  intent 
is  one  cheek,  the  cause  of  our  intention  is  the 
other,  and  of  course  we  are  to  be  intent  upon 
God,  and  for  God's  sake.  If  we  have  to  give 
our  mind  to  outward  things,  but  do  it  for  God's 
sake,  that  is  Martha's  activity,  but  not  neces- 
sarily Mary's  spiritual  leisure.  He  will  not 
say  that  Martha  has  reached  perfect  beauty  ; 
she  is  still  anxious  and  troubled  about  many 
things  ;  she  covers  herself  with  dust  in  many 
duties.  (Poor, dusty  Martha!) 2  However,  her 
pure  intention  will  shake  the  dust  ofF  her  by 
and  by,  perhaps  when  she  lies  down  to  her 
last  sleep.  Meanwhile  the  ideal  beauty  is  that 
of  the  shy  and  solitary  bird,  the  turtle-dove. 
We  should  imitate  its  shyness  and  its  love  of 
solitude.     We  should  sit  solitary,  as  she  does. 

*  This  must  be  the  Vulgate  of  Cant.  i.  9  :  "  Pulcrae 
sunt  genae  tuae,  sicut  turturis." 
'  My  comment,  not  St.  Bernard's. 


62  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

We  have  nothing  in  common  with  the  crowd, 
nothing  with  the  multitude.  Our  business  is 
to  forget  our  own  people  even,  and  our  father's 
house,  and  then  the  King  will  greatly  desire 
our  beauty,  and  say  that  our  cheeks  are  lovely, 
like  the  turtle-dove  ;  and  so  on,  through  all 
the  praises  of  a  quiet  life  with  Christ,  the 
necessity  for  which  has  not  been  done  away 
because  we  happen  to  have  seen  the  weakness 
and  insufficiency  of  mere  monasticism. 

In  a  similar  manner  when  he  comes  to  the 
text  which  says,  "My  Beloved  is  mine,  and  I 
am  His,  and  He  feeds  amongst  the  lilies,"  he 
has  to  explain  what  and  who  are  the  lilies — as, 
for  example,  that  the  lilies  are  conspicuous  by 
their  whiteness  and  their  sweetness  ;  and  spirits 
also  have  what  we  call  by  the  same  name,  a 
scent  and  a  harmony  of  figure.  And  that  is  the 
lily-state,  which  never  lacks  either  purity  or 
sweetness.  The  Lord  takes  away  from  us 
guile  and  sadness  ;  He  makes  us  simple  and  He 
makes  us  happy.  And  when  He  is  said  to 
feed   amongst    such    lilies,    it    expresses    His 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  63 

delight  in  pure  and  gladsome  souls.  Such 
were  Mary  and  Martha,  to  whose  house  the 
Lord  went  to  feed  and  to  be  fed.  (Mary 
and  Martha  were  a  pair  of  lovely  lily-souls, 
one  of  them  in  the  front  parlour  and  the 
other  in  the  kitchen  !)  ^ 

In  a  sermon  which  he  preached  on  the  Assump- 
tion of  the  Virgin  he  discusses  what  the  good 
part  is  which  was  not  to  be  taken  away  from 
Mary  ;  he  asks  what  comfort  it  could  to  be 
toiling  Martha  to  be  told  of  the  excellent  choice 
her  sister ;  he  praises  a  mixed  life,  of  both 
active  and  passive  elements.  For  does  not 
David  say,  "  O  God,  my  heart  is  ready,  is 
ready  ";  2  and  in  saying  "  ready  "  twice  over 
he  means  that  he  is  ready  for  a  quiet  time  with 
the  Lord,  and  ready  also  to  serve  his  brethren 
and  his  neighbours.  The  better  part  is  the 
work  of  devotion  to  the  Lord  ;  the  best  part  is 

^  Again  I  epitomise  and  popularise  Bernard's  argument. 

'  The  Vulgate  again  :  "  Paratum  cor  meum  Deus, 
paratum  cor  meum."  In  the  English  version  :  "  My 
heart  is  fixed,  my  heart  is  fixed." 


64  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

to  be  perfect  in  both  interior  devotion  and 
exterior  service.  In  this  house,  says  he,  we 
must  have  all  three  States  represented,  Mary 
and  Martha  and  Lazarus — Mary  to  think  pious 
and  sublime  thoughts  of  her  God,  Martha  to 
think  kind  and  merciful  thoughts  of  her  neigh- 
bour, and  Lazarus  to  think  sadly  and  humbly  of 
himself. 

St.  Teresa,  most  practical  and  level-headed 
of  the  ascetical  school  of  mystics,  shows  an 
inclination  towards  Martha  and  away  from 
Mary,  as  commonly  interpreted  ;  and  we  can 
perhaps  read  between  the  lines  and  conclude 
that  she  had  been  a  little  overdone  with  those 
in  her  convent  who  practised  too  exclusively 
the  cult  of  the  younger  sister.  Hence  she  says 
in  her  book  called  "  The  Interior  Castle  "  (Eng. 
trans.,  p.  197)  :  — 

"Believe  me,  Martha  and  Mary  must  go 
together  in  entertaining  our  Lord,  and  in 
order  to  have  Him  always  with  us,  we  must 
treat  Him  well  and  provide  food  for  Him. 
How   could    Mary  have  entertained   Him   in 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  65 

sitting  always  at  His  feet,  if  her  sister  had  not 
helped  her.  His  food  is,  that  we  should  strive 
in  every  possible  way  that  souls  may  be  saved, 
and  may  praise  Him. 

*'  You  may  make  two  objections  :  one  that 
our  Lord  told  Mary  she  had  '  chosen  the 
better  part '  ;  true,  because  she  had  already 
performed  the  office  of  Martha,  and  showed 
great  regard  for  our  Lord  by  washing  His 
feet,  and  wiping  them  with  her  hair." 

You  see  that,  without  stopping  to  discuss 
Teresa's  harmonisation  of  Gospel  narratives,  we 
must  admit  that  Teresa  was  in  favour  of  com- 
bining the  virtues  of  the  two  sisters  in  her 
spiritual  ideal. 

It  would  be  easy  to  give  you  other  instances 
of  the  way  in  which  the  mystical  fancy  played 
round  the  case  of  the  two  sisters  ;  for  example, 
we  shall  find  that  St.  Macarius  of  Egypt  is 
more  favourable  to  sister  Martha  than  most  of 
his  brethren : — 

'*  When  the  work  of  prayer  and  discourse  is 
fittingly    carried    out,  it  exceeds   every  other 


66  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

virtue  and  commandment.  The  Lord  Himself 
is  witness  thereof:  for  when  He  turned  into 
the  house  of  Martha  and  Mary,  and  Martha 
was  occupied  with  serving,  while  Mary  sat  at 
His  feet  and  feasted  on  the  ambrosia  of  His 
divine  speech,  and  her  sister  was  blaming  her 
because  she  did  not  share  the  work  with  her, 
and  came  to  Christ  about  it,  then  He  put  the 
chief  thing  before  the  subordinate  and  said, 
*  Martha,  Martha,'  &c.  Now,  He  did  not  say 
this  as  though  He  reprobated  the  work  of  ser- 
vice, but  in  order  that  He  might  put  the  greater 
before  the  less.  For  how  could  He  have  stood 
aloof  from  service :  Himself  becoming  the 
pattern  of  it,  by  washing  the  disciples'  feet  ; 
and  He  was  so  far  from  hindering  it,  that  He 
enjoined  on  His  disciples  to  do  the  same  to  one 
another.  .  .  .  However,  you  see  first  things 
claim  first  place  ;  but  they  may  spring  from 
the  same  blessed  root."  ' 

So  much  having   been  said  with  regard  to 
the  degrees  of  virtue  reached  by  the  two  sisters, 
^  Macarius  :  "  De  Oratione." 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  67 

it  is  proper  to  stop  and  ask  whether  we  are 
not  treating  the  subject  too  much  as  a  judg- 
ment of  fair  womQiiy  from  a  woman  s  point  of 
view.  St.  Bernard  counts  with  Madame 
Guyon  in  this  inquiry,  and  I  hasten  to  put  in 
the  missing  factor,  in  order  that  the  Gospel  of 
the  day  can  be  considered  Universal  Gospel,  by 
showing  that  there  is  distinctly  a  man's  side  to 
the  question  as  well  as  a  woman's.  You  will 
see  it  at  once  if  I  ask  you  a  blunt  question. 
Did  you  ever  have  your  papers  put  in  order,  or 
your  books  dusted  ?  Was  not  the  person  who 
undertook  that  arduous  task  of  the  opposite 
sex  and  of  the  sisterhood  of  St.  Martha  ^  Is 
not  the  sorting  of  papers  and  the  rehabili- 
tation of  the  outsides  of  books  as  much  a 
matter  of  feminine  diaconate  as  the  peeling  of 
potatoes  or  the  beating  of  eggs.f*  But  I  need 
not  labour  the  point :  it  has  been  done  for 
me  by  Dr.  John  Watson  in  his  story  of 
Rabbi  Saunderson.  Rabbi  Saunderson  had  a 
housekeeper  whose  name  was  Mrs.  Pitillo 
(Martha  Pitillo  was  her  long  name,  for  cer- 


68  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

tain),  and  he  tells  us  of  her  gifts  in  the 
following  strain  :  — 

"  She  had  the  episcopal  faculty  in  quite  a 
conspicuous  degree,  and  was,  I  have  often 
thought,  a  woman  of  sound  judgment. 

"  We  were  not  able  at  all  times  to  see  eye 
to  eye,  as  she  had  an  unfortunate  tendency 
to  meddle  with  my  books  and  papers,  and  to 
arrange  them  after  an  artificial  fashion.  This 
she  called  tidying,  and  in  its  most  extreme 
form,  cleaning.  With  all  her  excellences, 
there  was  also  in  her  what  I  have  noticed  in 
most  women,  a  flavour  of  guile,  and  on  one 
occasion,  when  I  was  making  a  brief  journey 
through  Holland  and  France  in  search  of  comely 
editions  of  the  Fathers,  she  had  the  books 
carried  out  into  the  garden  and  dusted.  It 
was  the  space  of  two  years  before  I  regained 
mastery  of  my  library  again,  and  unto  this  day 
I  cannot  lay  my  hands  on  the  Service-book  of 
King  Henry  VIII.,  which  I  had  in  the  second 
edition,  to  say  nothing  of  an  original  edition  of 
Rutherford's  '  Lex  Rex.'     It  does  not  become 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  69 

me,  however,  to  reflect  on  the  efforts  of  that 
worthy  woman,  and,  if  any  one  could  be  saved 
by  good  works,  her  place  is  assured.  I  was 
with  her  before  she  died,  and  her  last  words  to 
me  were,  '  Tell  Jean  tae  dust  yir  bukes  ance  in 
sax  months,  and  for  ony  sake  keep  ae  chair  for 
sittin'  on.'  It  was  not  perhaps  the  testimony 
one  would  have  desired  in  the  circumstances, 
but  yet,  Mr.  Carmichael,  I  have  often  thought 
that  there  was  a  spirit  of — of  unselfishness,  in 
fact,  that  showed  the  working  of  grace." 

Later  in  the  same  evening  Mr.  Saunderson's 
mind  returned  to  his  friend's  spiritual  state  ;  for 
he  enters  into  a  long  argument,  to  show  that 
while  Mary  was  more  spiritual,  Martha  must 
have  been  within  the  Divine  Election. 

My  friends  ask  me  sometimes,  when  I  quote 
the  judgment  of  the  experts  out  of  the  past  of 
the  Church,  what  I  think  of  the  matter  myself. 

This  question  I  am  now  able  to  answer,  in 
the  sense  that  I  think  with  Rabbi  Saunderson. 

Having  now  delved  sufficiently  into  the  past, 
we  may  now   profitably  return  to  the  uncom- 


70  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

mented  Gospel,  and  the  most  obvious  con- 
clusions that  can  be  drawn  therefrom.  We 
shall  assume,  then,  that  any  separation  between 
the  active  and  the  contemplative  life  is  not  of 
the  nature  of  a  final  settlement.  If  they  are 
separated  for  a  time,  it  is  that  they  may  be 
united  for  ever,  for  each  requires  the  other  for 
its  perfection,  and  we  ought  to  be  able  to  pass 
instinctively  from  one  to  the  other,  without  any 
feeling  that  we  have  left  the  temple  and  gone 
into  the  street.  At  the  same  time,  we  have  to 
remember  that  in  this  point  of  view  the 
spiritual  has  the  right  of  way  as  over  against 
the  material.  The  elder  must  serve  the 
younger  ;  Martha  is  the  elder,  as  has  been 
divined  by  an  acute  exegesis  from  the  Bethany 
passages  in  the  fourth  Gospel,  especially  from 
the  statement  that  "  Jesus  loved  Martha,  and 
her  sister,  and  Lazarus."  So  Martha  has  to 
turn  into  younger  sister.  But,  just  as  in  the 
first  instance,  where  the  words  were  used  of  the 
elder  serving  the  younger,  the  pair  were  really 
twins,  so  we  may  say  of  Martha  and  Mary,  the 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  71 

Active  and  the  Contemplative.  It  will,  however, 
not  be  recorded  that  "  Mary  have  I  loved,  and 
Martha  have  I  hated  "  ;  the  Scripture  has  pro- 
vided against  that.  For  a  person  is  not  hated 
because  she  is  reproved  and  admonished,  and 
I  think  we  may  say  that  the  repetition  of  her 
name  implies  exhortation  or  reproof  of  the 
strongest  kind.  Jesus  had  a  habit  of  using  the 
repeated  form  of  address.  This  has  often  been 
noticed  ;  but  few  people  know  how  many  pass- 
ages where  our  Lord  is  making  an  address  have 
a  various  reading  intimating  that  the  person  was 
addressed  in  a  double  form.  We  are  familiar 
with  "  Simon,  Simon  "  ;  with  "  Saul,  Saul  "  ; 
with  '  Jerusalem,  Jerusalem  "  ;  all  of  which 
are  warnings  or  reproofs,  and  it  is  difficult  to 
separate  "  Martha,  Martha  "  from  this  group  ; 
but  there  is  another  group  supplied  by  the 
readings  of  the  New  Testament,  readings  which 
are  probably  genuine,  though  neglected  by  the 
editors,  according  to  which  our  Lord  calls  the 
dead  to  life  by  a  repeated  address.  Thus  He 
said  to  the  maiden,  "  Maid,  Maid,  I  say  unto 


72  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

thee,  Arise "  ;  and  so,  *'  Young  man,  young 
man,"  in  the  miracle  at  Nain  ;  and  last,  and 
most  important  of  all,  He  said,  "  Lazarus, 
Lazarus,  come  forth."  This  is  not  the  place 
to  discuss  the  value  of  the  individual  readings  ; 
the  early  Fathers  knew  them  and  drew  atten- 
tion to  them. 

Thus  Aphrahat  says  in  his  8th  Homily  : 
"  The  Lord  in  His  first  advent  raised  three 
dead  to  life,  that  the  testimony  of  three  might 
be  confirmed  to  us.  For  when  He  raised  the 
widow's  son.  He  called  him  by  a  double  word, 
*  Young  man,  young  man,  arise.'  And  he 
arose  in  life.  In  the  same  way  He  called  twice 
the  daughter  of  the  ruler  of  the  synagogue, 
and  said,  '  Maid,  maid,  arise.'  And  her  spirit 
returned,  and  she  arose.  And  when  Lazarus 
was  dead,  He  came  to  the  tomb,  and  prayed 
and  cried  out  with  a  loud  voice,  '  Lazarus 
(Lazarus),  come  forth.'  And  the  dead  man 
came  forth  from  the  sepulchre." 

That  will  suffice  to  show  that  the  repeated 
call  was  believed  to  have  an  urgency  of  its  own. 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  73 

And  I  shall  assume  that  multiplicity,  out  of 
which  Martha  was  called  by  the  repetition  of  the 
reproving  voice,  is,  in  a  way,  a  kind  of  death, 
like  the  state  of  Saul,  when  the  voice  from 
heaven  called  him  in  a  similar  manner. 

Now,  I  am  aware  that  many  resent  the 
emphasis  which  is  in  this  way  put  upon  sim- 
plicity of  life  and  occupation.  They  dislike 
the  new  reading,  "  a  few  things,  Martha,  or 
one."  They  dislike  the  abandonment  of  an  old 
interpretation,  which  has  certainly  had  gracious 
results  attaching  to  it.  *'  You  have  spoiled  my 
best  sermon,"  said  one  of  the  revisers  when  the 
change  was  agreed  on.  And  certainly  it  does 
sound  much  higher  to  say  that  the  one  thing 
needful  was  to  choose  Christ  and  attach  oneself 
to  Him  ;  and  it  looks  like  a  bathos,  to  make 
Christ  peep  into  the  kitchen  and  say  to  Martha 
not  merely  that  three  courses  are  as  good  as 
ten,  but  that  one  course  is  as  good  as  three  ! 

Why  should  our  Lord  trouble  to  simpHfy 
life  and  our    ideas    of  what   life  consists   in  .? 


74  MARY  AND  MARTHA 

The  answer  is  that  both  our  happiness  and 
our  usefulness  depend  upon  the  simplifica- 
tions which  we  introduce  into  life,  or  which 
He  introduces  for  us.  And  the  limitation 
works  out  in  this  way.  It  relieves  us  from 
distraction,  and  it  finds  us  the  leisure  which  is 
necessary  for  the  cultivation  of  the  spiritual 
life.  How  important  this  thought  of  leisure 
with  Christ  is !  In  the  vocabularies  of  the 
early  Christians  there  are  two  words  which 
are  difficult  to  translate.  One  is  the  word 
SxoXa^w  (^Scholazo) — the  Christian  takes  time,  or 
has  leisure.  It  occurs  in  the  First  Epistle  of  the 
Corinthians  ( I  Cor.  vii.  5) — "  that  ye  may  have 
leisure  for  prayer."  So  in  Polycarp  :  "  The 
Christian  takes  time  for  prayer "  (<rxoX«^")' 
And  the  corresponding  Latin  word  vacat  is 
everywhere  in  some  classes  of  writers  :  shall  we 
translate  it,  "The  Christian  is  free  for  Christ, 
is  free  for  prayer."  Well,  it  is  only  by  the 
culture  and  habits  of  the  spiritual  life  that  this 
blessed  leisure  and  beautiful  vacancy  and  long 
expected  holiday  is  obtained.     And  if  we  insist 


MARY  AND  MARTHA  75 

on  going  into  all  the  pleasures,  knowing  all  the 
people,  having  everything  handsome  about  us, 
and  the  like,  we  shall  never  know  either  the 
life  of  the  turtle-dove  or  the  perfume  and 
beauty  of  the  lily. 

And  we  may  say  nearly  the  same  thing  over 
people  that  insist  on  going  to  meetings  every 
night  in  the  week,  and  are  too  tired  to  talk  to 
the  Lord  either  when  they  lie  down  or  when 
they  rise  up.  As  St.  Bernard  says,  they  are  a 
very  dusty  people  ;  and  if  they  had  knowh 
better,  they  might  have  been  covered  with 
another  kind  of  dust,  of  which  the  Psalmist 
speaks  when  he  talks  of  "  wings  of  a  dove 
covered  with  silver,  and  her  feathers  with 
yellow  gold." 

In  all  this  we  are  careful  to  say  nothing  dis- 
paraging of  sister  Martha.  Her  menu  was 
admirable,  and  no  doubt  she  loved  the  Lord  ; 
no  doubt  they  all  loved  the  Lord,  and  there 
might  be  a  Scripture  which  says  that  '*  Jesus 
was  loved  by  Martha,  and  her  sister  and 
Lazarus "  :    but    it  is  one  thing  to  love   the 


76  MARY  AND   MARTHA 

Lord,  and  another  thing  to  take  all  the  oppor- 
tunities to  cultivate  the  relation  of  love  with 
Him.  There  is  the  good  part,  there  is  the 
elect  portion,  there  the  Inviolable  right  and 
privilege  and  advantage,  where  settled  peace  is 
found,  and  where  all  is  enjoyed  which  the 
world  gives  not  nor  takes  away. 


THE    USE    OF    THE    CONCORDANCE 
AND   OF   THE   BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK 


CHAPTER   IV 

THE    USE    OF    THE    CONCORDANCE    AND    OF    THE 
BIBLE    TEXT-BOOK 

T  SUPPOSE  that  we  are  all  of  us  agreed 
that  there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  best  com- 
mentary upon  the  Bible  is  the  Bible  itself.  We 
do  not  mean  by  that  to  disparage  in  any  way 
those  busy  men  who  have  sought  to  elucidate 
from  all  quarters  the  obscurities  of  the  text.  If 
they  were  consulted,  they  would  maintain  that 
they  always  regarded  as  the  leading  principle  in 
their  interpretations  the  duty  of  explaining  the 
Bible  by  the  Bible.  And  any  one  can  see  the 
reasonableness  of  this  ;  for  if  Paul  agrees  with 
himself,  then  we  may  ask  Paul  to  explain  Paul ; 
and  if  John  agrees  with  John,   then    we  take 

79 


8o  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

John  as  our  guide  to  the  meaning  of  John.  In 
the  same  way,  if  there  is,  as  we  believe,  a  sub- 
stantial underlying  agreement,  both  in  expe- 
rience and  in  expression,  between  the  body  of  our 
teachers  in  the  New  Testament,  then  the  fact  of 
this  underlying  agreement  makes  it  necessary 
that  we  should  use  one  teacher  to  explain  the 
meaning  and  to  throw  light  upon  the  experience 
of  another  ;  and  going  one  step  farther,  if  there 
is  a  connection  between  the  teaching  of  the 
Old  Testament  and  the  teaching  of  the  New, 
which  makes  the  latter  to  be  the  advance  and 
outcome  of  the  former,  it  will  be  necessary  to 
read  either  one  of  the  Testaments  with  the  other 
(if  it  does  not  sound  too  Irish  to  say  so)  open 
at  the  same  time. 

And  I  think  this  must  be  what  Wesley 
and  others  meant  when  they  said  that  they 
had  become  men  of  one  book :  literally,  of 
course,  this  could  not  be  true  ;  for  in  that 
case  Wesley  ought  not  to  have  published  his 
"  Notes  on  the  New  Testament "  which  made  all 
his  preachers  to  be  men  of  at  least  two  books. 


AND   OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  8i 

Moreover,  the  Bible  itself  is  not  a  single  book. 
It  is  39  +  27  books,  or  66  books  ;  and  some 
of  these  are  composite.  Some  people,  for 
instance,  say  there  are  two  Isaiahs  :  it  does 
not  affect  our  reasoning  if  there  should  be 
67  books  instead  of  66  in  the  collection.  So 
that  to  talk  of  being  a  man  of  one  book 
only  means  that  one  has  chosen  to  frequent 
a  single  library  to  the  exclusion  of  other 
libraries. 

But  it  is  certain  that  the  person  who  most 
frequents  the  library  in  question  will,  if  he  is  an 
intelligent  and  thoughtful  person,  be  the  keenest 
to  seek  help  from  all  quarters  for  the  purpose  of 
illustrating  the  volumes  that  he  loves.  So  that 
it  is  almost  impossible  for  him  to  be  a  man  of 
one  book.  Now,  suppose  that  such  a  person  is 
a  preacher  of  the  Word,  one  who  enjoys  the 
privilege  of  access  to  the  people  in  the  matter  of 
religious  teaching  and  of  access  to  God  in  order 
that  he  may  himself  be  religiously  taught.  What 
is  the  best  kind  of  help  that  we  can  recommend 
such  an  one  in  the  matter  of  external  apparatus 

7 


82  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

for  the  knowledge  of  the  Scripture  ?  We  shall 
all  be  agreed  that  the  inward  man  must  be 
saturated  with  the  sense  of  the  Divine  Presence  ; 
he  ought  to  be  a  baptized  soul,  one  that  knows 
how  to  come  into  harmony  with  God  and  how 
to  keep  the  harmony  when  he  comes  to  the 
blessed  place  where  it  is  his  definite  and 
personal  experience. 

But  while  we  shall  all  be  agreed  that  if  the 
first  thing  to  be  sought  is  that  we  may  be 
charged  up  to  the  point  of  saturation  with  the 
influences  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  the  second  thing 
is  that  we  should  understand  how  to  saturate 
the  outward  mind  with  a  knowledge  of  the 
Scripture.  For  a  Bibleless  preacher  to 
venture  upon  a  Christian  platform  is  as  bad  as 
for  a  prayerless  professor  to  frequent  the 
bedsides  of  the  sick  and  the  dying.  The  devil 
laughs  at  such  an  one,  and  very  often  the  people 
laugh  at  him  too.  He  may  make  the  most 
brilliant  epigrams,  tell  the  most  engaging 
stories,  repeat  the  tit-bits  from  the  most  trust- 
worthy newspapers  (if  there  are  any  trustworthy 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  83 

newspapers)  ;  but  after  a  time  the  sparkle  is  out 
of  the  epigrams,  the  stories  have  become  stale, 
and  the  newspapers  are  back  numbers.  On  the 
other  hand,  a  biblical  preacher  gives  his  message 
in  language  that  is  better  than  his  own,  and  his 
subject-matter  does  not  wear  out  or  grow  old, 
he  is  occupied  with  an  everlasting  gospel,  and 
the  Spirit  of  the  Lord  honours  his  preaching 
by  attaching  to  it  permanent  results  in  the 
conversion  and  sanctification  of  individual  men 
and  women.  The  Bible-preacher  does  not  go 
out  of  date,  because  the  Bible  itself  has  not  gone 
out  of  date  :  on  the  contrary,  he  is  more  in 
demand  than  ever,  and  the  cry  of  the  churches 
that  are  eager  for  spiritual  life  must  surely  be 
very  much  like  the  message  that  was  sent  after 
my  late  friend  Edward  Millard,  who  some  years 
since  visited  the  Mission  churches  in  Armenia  ; 
"  Send  us,"  they  said,  *'  some  more  Bible- 
preachers."  A  persecuted  and  suffering  seed 
of  the  kingdom  knows  what  is  best  suited  to  its 
conditions ;  and  what  suits  their  condition  is 
likely  to  be  also  the    proper  cordial  for  ours. 


84  THE   USE  OF   THE   CONCORDANCE 

Now,  in  dealing  with  the  question  how  to  turn 
our  preachers  into  Bible-preachers,  and  how  to 
make  them  saturate  with  Scripture,  I  find  practi- 
cally two  directions  in  which  I  have  had  a  great 
deal  of  help  ;  they  are  announced  at  the  head  of 
this  paper  as  the  concordance  and  the  text- 
book— two  of  our  best  practical  helps,  and  two 
of  the  most  accessible.  Neither  of  them  is  very 
costly  ;  a  Scripture  text-book,  like  the  one  to 
which  I  shall  presently  refer,  the  "  Daily  Light 
on  the  Daily  Path,"  can  be  had  for  a  very  small 
sum  ;  a  concordance  is  more  costly,  but  it  is 
becoming  common  to  bind  up  with  the  Bible  a 
concordance  of  the  principal  words,  at  least;  and 
although  the  matter  is  complicated  by  the  fact 
that  there  are  two  rival  translations  in  the  field, 
you  will  find  that  a  book  like  Dr.  Wright's 
"  Bible  Treasury  "  will  give  you  the  necessary 
guidance  to  find  where  any  word  that  you  are 
seeking  occurs  in  either  of  the  two  translations. 
So  that  the  apparatus  for  concordance  work  is 
not  very  costly  :  you  can  go  into  the  business,  at 
least  in  English,  with  a  very  moderate  capital. 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  85 

Now  let  us  think  for  a  little  while  what  use 
we  are  going  to  make  of  our  concordance  when 
we  get  it.  In  the  first  place,  we  propose  to 
search  the  Scriptures  for  the  occurrence  of  any 
given  word  or  expression,  in  order  that  by  com- 
paring Scripture  with  Scripture  we  may  find  out 
all  that  the  Spirit-filled  men  have  said  on  any 
particular  subject.  In  the  second  place,  we 
propose  to  search  the  Scriptures,  not  so  much 
for  exact  words  as  for  parallel  ideas,  so  as  to 
find  out  what  is  the  spiritual  unity  that 
underlies  the  language  of  the  Spirit-filled  men. 
The  study  of  the  parallel  words  will  lead  us  on, 
almost  insensibly,  to  the  study  of  the  ideas.  Let 
us  take  an  instance.  Suppose  that  you  are 
searching  the  Scripture  in  order  to  get  at  the 
meaning  of  the  very  first  promise  in  the  New 
Testament,  viz.,  the  words,  "  He  shall  save  His 
people  from  their  sins."  We  take  the  word 
*'  save "  and  study  it  in  the  light  of  the  New 
and  Old  Testaments.  We  find  plenty  of  pass- 
ages, because  our  God  is  a  saving  God,  and  His 
message  to  men  in  all  times  is  a  message   of 


86  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

salvation.  We  find  every  kind  of  distress,  indi- 
vidual and  national,  comprehended  under  the 
doctrine  that  the  Lord  is  with  His  people  to 
save  them  and  to  deliver  them.  We  find  that 
the  word  has  an  application  to  time,  as  well  as 
to  particular  distress  ;  it  can  be  said  in  the  past 
tense,  so  that  some  of  the  salvation  is  behind  us, 
as  when  Peter  said  that  the  Lord  had  sent 
His  angel  and  delivered  him  from  the  expecta- 
tion of  the  Jews,  or  when  Jude  says  that 
"  the  Lord  saved  His  people  out  of  Egypt,"  ^ 
or  when  Paul  says  "  He  delivered  us  from  so 
great  a  death."  2 

But  then  it  can  also  be  said  in  the  present 
tense,  as  when  we  are  told  by  Paul  that  Christ 
"  gave  Himself  for  our  sins,  that  He  might 
deliver  us  from  this  present  evil  world,  according 
to  the  will  of  our  God  and  Father,"  3  in  which 
case  it  is  clear  that  the  world  is  not  thought  of 
as   passing  immediately  away,   but    as    a  con- 

'  Jude  5  (awaag). 

^   2  Cor.  i.  10  (epvaaro). 

3  Gal.  i,  4  [i^iXrjTai). 


AND   OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  87 

tinuous  present  world,  in  which  the  believer 
experiences  a  continuous  present  salvation. 

Then  there  is  the  further  outlook,  in  which 
the  salvation  is  contemplated  as  future,  accord- 
ing to  which  we  are  told  that  "  He  is  able  to 
save  to  the  uttermost  all  that  come  unto  God  by 
Him,"  I  and  the  uttermost  salvation  has  for  one 
of  its  interpretations  the  meaning  that  "  He  is 
able  to  save  us  up  to  the  goal,''  as  my  friend 
Frank  Crossley  used  to  put  it. 

Taking  the  three  tenses  together,  we  have  St. 
Paul's  statement,  "  who  delivered  us  2  from  so 
great  a  death  and  doth  deliver  :  in  whom  we 
trust  that  He  will  yet  dehver  us,"  in  which,  as 
some  one  said,  you  have  the  past,  present,  and 
future  of  the  Christian's  deliverance. 

But  suppose  we  look  a  little  closer  into 
the  passages  which  we  have  explored  for  under 
the  heads  "  save  "  and  "  deliver  "  in  the  New 
Testament.  We  shall  find  that  the  scope  of 
the  words  is  very  wide.      This  becomes  even 

'   Heb.  vii.  25  {(rij^eiv  elg  to  irayTtXes), 
^  2  Cor.  i.  10  (ipvaaTo). 


88  THE   USE   OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

more  striking  if  we  were  able  to  make  the 
examination  with  a  Greek  concordance,  or  if 
the  concordance  were  arranged  so  as  to  give  the 
marginal  alternative  translations  as  well  as  those 
which  are  introduced  into  the  text.  For  instance, 
we  should  find  Jesus  saying  to  the  ruler  of  the 
synagogue  whose  daughter  had  just  died,  "  Fear 
not,  only  believe,  and  she  will  be  saved" — (rwOricreTai 
(Luke  viii.  50)  ;  and  in  the  same  way,  when  they 
bring  the  sick  people  to  touch  the  hem  of  our 
Lord's  garment,  we  are  told  that  "  as  many  as 
touched  Him  were  saved" — tadjt^ovro  (Mark 
vi.  ^6).  So  in  Acts  iv.  10  we  should  find  Peter 
asking  the  rulers  whether  they  wanted  to  know 
by  what  means  the  lame  man  had  been  saved 
(o-eo-ojorai)  ;  and  we  should  conclude,  from  these 
and  a  number  of  similar  cases  where  the  word  is 
used,  that  it  had  almost  a  medical  force,  and 
carried  with  it  the  idea  of  restored  conditions 
and  repaired  functions.  Certainly  all  of  this  is 
involved  in  the  great  salvation. 

But    then,  as  I   said,   we   not   only  want   to 
collect  words  and  compare  them,  but  we  want  to 


AND  OF   THE   BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  89 

detect  the  common  ideas  which  are  in  the  minds 
of  those  who  use  the  words,  and  to  watch  the 
way  in  which  the  ideas  become  more  and  more 
definite,  and  more  and  more  spiritual  and 
comprehensive. 

A  recent  writer  ^  has  said  with  regard  to  this 
idea  of  salvation  something  very  like  what  I 
have  been  saying.  He  says  that  "  in  the 
classical  literature  and  in  the  public  inscriptions 
of  Greece  the  words  '  save  '  and  '  saviour  ' 
nearly  always  refer  to  material  preservation  and 
safety.  .  .  .  Any  one  who  consults  a  concord- 
ance of  the  Bible  can  see  how  the  meaning  of 
the  word  '  save '  changes  and  rises  as  one 
passes  from  the  Pentateuch  and  the  historical 
books  of  the  Old  Testament  to  the  Psalms  and 
Isaiah.  In  the  earlier  stages  of  Israel's  history 
it  has  a  predominantly  worldly  and  temporal 
meaning  ;  at  a  later  time  the  salvation  longed 
for  by  the  inspired  writers  is  not  merely  worldly 
but  spiritual,  involving  a  right  relation  to  God 
and  a  consequent  state  in  one's  self. 

^  Percy  Gardner,  "  Exploratio  Evangelica,"  p.  321. 


90  THE   USE  OF   THE   CONCORDANCE 

"  Among  Christians  we  find  all  three  of  the 
renderings  of  the  word  *  save  '  in  use — the 
lower,  the  middle  and  the  higher  meaning. 
Some  most  earnestly  desire  safety  from  foes  and 
the  mischances  of  life.  Some  most  frequently 
and  most  ardently  desire  the  salvation  of  their 
souls  after  death  from  the  flames  of  hell  and  the 
power  of  Satan.  The  more  spiritual  schools  of 
Christianity  rather  lay  stress  on  the  need  of 
salvation  from  one's  own  worse  self  and  from 
the  terrible  power  of  evil  habit,"  &c. 

It  appears,  then,  that  we  are  led  by  the  mere 
study  of  the  concordance,  without  any  other 
commentary,  to  the  conclusion  that  salvation  is 
a  word  which  in  the  story  of  the  Church  is  con- 
stantly putting  on  newer  and  higher  and  more 
wonderful  meanings,  both  for  the  world  that 
now  is  and  for  that  which  is  to  come.  And 
what  is  true  of  the  Church  is  also  true  of  the 
individual  soul,  which  recapitulates  in  itself  the 
history  of  the  tribe. 

Now,  I  have  selected  this  instance  because 
it  bears  on  the  question  of  preaching.    A  man 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  91 

who  is  called  to  preach  must  have  one  corner 
of  his  mind  given  up  to  the  parallels  by  which 
Scripture  elucidates  itself ;  he  must  find  out 
where  a  given  word  is  used,  and  what  colour 
the  word  takes  at  particular  times  and  amongst 
particular  peoples.  He  does  not,  of  course,  go 
into  his  pulpit  with  a  Bible  under  one  arm 
and  a  concordance  under  .another ;  but  his 
renewed  nature  has  in  it  both  Bible  and  con- 
cordance, and  it  is  a  part  of  the  work  of  the 
Good  Remembrancer,  the  Blessed  Spirit,  to  turn 
the  pages  of  the  concordance  or  Scripture  so 
as  to  bring  to  light  the  meaning,  and  to  rein- 
force what  is  said  by  the  method  of  two  or 
three  witnesses  in  whose  mouth  every  word 
may  be  established.  Sermons  preached  in  the 
power  of  the  Spirit  are  often  very  rich  in  the 
parallels  drawn  from  different  parts  of  the 
Scriptures ;  and  conversely,  when  one  gets 
into  the  habit  of  noting  the  parallels,  the 
material  is  often  at  hand  for  enforcing  truth 
in  the  power  of  the  Spirit  of  God. 

For   instance,  here  is  a  little  chain  of  texts 


92  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

which  I  saw  hanging  on  my  wall  recently  in  one 
of  the  religious  almanacs,  which  chain  seems  to 
me  to  furnish  a  good  ground  for  a  straight  talk 
to  Christians  ;  there  were  three  texts,  arranged 
for  three  following  days,  but  evidently  parts 
of  one  idea,  and  arrived  at  by  the  concord- 
ance : — 

1.  "Ye  did  not  receive  the  spirit  of  bondage 
.  .  .  but  ye  did  receive  the  spirit  of  sonship  " 
(Rom.  viii.  15). 

2.  "  We  have  not  received  the  spirit  of  the 
world,  but  the  Spirit  of  God"  (i  Cor.  ii.  12). 

3.  "  God  hath  not  given  us  the  spirit  of  fear, 
but  of  power  and  love  and  a  sound  mind" 
(2  Tim.  i,  7). 

Here  is  a  beautiful  chain  of  experimental 
verses,  all  cast  in  the  same  mould,  all  built  upon 
the  same  pattern,  with  the  negative  first  and 
the  positive  second  ;  on  one  side  bondage, 
worldliness,  and  fear ;  on  the  other  sonship, 
spiritual  gifts,  power,  love,  and  sanctified 
common-sense.  Try  and  work  it  out  in 
detail. 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT- BOOK  93 

Often  a  very  little  and  unimportant  word 
may  furnish  the  clue  to  some  of  the  mysteries 
of  the  kingdom  of  God.  An  illustration  of 
this  came  to  me  once  in  my  own  experience. 
The  Lord  gave  me,  just  before  I  was  going 
to  my  regular  meeting  with  my  friends,  a  little 
meditation  on  one  of  the  prepositions  in  the 
New  Testament,  a  word  so  small  that  only  the 
most  extended  concordances  would  have  regis- 
tered it,  but  not  so  small  that  it  could  not 
furnish  an  adequate  text  whereby  the  Spirit 
might  minister  to  the  saints.  It  was  the  little 
word  wifh.  As  far  as  I  can  recall  the  subject, 
it  came  out  in  the  following  way  : 

The  prepositions  in  the  New  Testament  are 
of  the  nature  of  theological  professors  ;  they 
are  scribes  of  the  kingdom  of  heaven  ;  they 
have  the  key  of  the  Divine  knowledge.  Illus- 
trate from  the  verse  '*  Of  Him,  and  through 
Him  and  to  Him  are  all  things."  Or  take 
a  single  word  or  expression,  like  the  phrase 
"  in  Christ."  How  mystical  !  How  deep 
in    the    abysses    of    God  !       In    Christ,    then 


94  THE   USE   OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

a  new  creation — "  I  in  them  and  they  in 
Me!" 

Now  observe  that  in  the  New  Testament 
the  word  "  with "  is  an  experimental  word, 
it  is  a  summary  of  experimental  theology. 
And  we  note  that — 

(a)  It  is  the  charter  of  incorporation  of  the 
new  order,  and  holds  the  key  of  the  Church 
door.  Christ's  first  disciples  signed  no  creed, 
embraced  no  confession,  but  "  He  chose  twelve 
that  they  might  be  wiih  Him  and  that  He 
might  send  them  forth  to  preach."  And  in 
another  Gospel  we  are  told  that  "  they  went 
into  an  house."  Thus  the  door  into  the  king- 
dom was  an  house  door — perhaps  our  Lord's 
"  own  hired  house,"  perhaps  a  house  some  one 
lent  Him.  In  the  latter  case  the  owner  said, 
"  You  can  come  and  bring  your  friends  that  they 
may  be  wi^h  you  "  ;  in  the  former  He  Himself 
said,  "  You  can  come  in  and  be  My  friends  and 
be  wifh  M?,"  and  the  key- word  "  with " 
implies  converse  and  retirement :  hence  we  find 
it  said,  "  When  they  were  alone,  privately,  they 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  95 

asked  Him,"  or  "  When  they  were  come  into 
the  house,  He  asked  them." 

(^)  This  preposition  "  with "  is  the  word 
which  gives  historical  value  to  the  testimony 
which  the  witnesses  bear  concerning  him.  They 
could  say,  "  We  were  with  Him."  Like  the 
earlier  companions  of  St.  Francis,  they  could 
say,  "  Nos  qui  cum  eo  fuimus" — "  We  who  were 
with  Him."  And  it  is  recognised  by  others 
to  whom  their  testimony  comes  that  the  value 
of  the  testimony  turns  on  this  single  word,  "  and 
they  took  knowledge  of  them  that  they  had 
been  with  Jesus." 

(r)  This  preposition  can  lecture  on  the  con- 
tinuity of  the  Church  and  upon  the  apostolic 
succession.  Professor  With's  lectures  on  the 
Church  are  the  only  ones  worth  listening  to. 
For  imagine  that  if  there  was  no  reinforce- 
ment of  historical  truth  by  direct  communion, 
we  should  be  getting  farther  and  farther  from 
Christ  as  the  days  go  by,  and  our  testimony 
would  be  a  continually  extended  and  a  con- 
tinually weakened  chain.     The  only  succession 


96  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

worth  talking  about  is  of  those  who  have  "seen 
a  man  in  the  clouds  and  heard  Him  talk  with 
them." 

(d)  This  preposition  can  discourse  to  us  not 
merely  out  of  the  past  and  concerning  the 
present,  but  it  gives  special  lectures  on  the  life 
to  come.  Some  one  says  *'  to  be  with  Christ 
which  is  far  better."  He  was  not  a  man  who 
had  climbed  the  outward  mountain  of  trans- 
figuration along  with  those  who  saw  the  glory. 
His  feet  had  never  trodden  the  dusty  highway 
along  with  those  who  first  heard  the  command 
to  "  leave  all,  and  follow  Me."  Yet  he  does 
not  talk  in  a  lower  spiritual  strain  than  the  very 
chief  of  the  apostles.  It  is  not  merely  that  he 
is  "in  Christ,"  or  "after  Christ,"  but  '■'■  with 
Christ,"  that  is  his  theme,  and  when  he  gets 
on  that  theme,  he  is  as  affectionate  as  St. 
John.  He  defines  the  life  to  come  by  one 
single  preposition,  "  We  shall  be  ever  with 
the  Lord." 

{e)  And  from  this   we   learn    finally     what 
shape   a   true    Christian    hope    takes.      It  is  a 


AND  OF   THE  BIBLE    TEXT-BOOK  97 

renewal  of  a  companionship,  known  in  the  days 
of  His  flesh,  or  in  the  period  of  ours,  which 
renewal  is  the  ultimate  definition  of  heaven. 
For  we  say  with  Baxter  : — 

"  My  knowledge  of  that  life  is  small, 
The  eye  of  faith  is  dim ; 
But  'tis  enough  that  Christ  knows  all, 
And  I  shall  be  with  Him." 

You  see,  even  a  little  preposition  of  four  letters 
can  talk  great  truths  to  us,  and,  incidentally, 
you  see  how  Quaker  sermons  are  made. 

Now  let  us  pass  on  from  the  question  of  the 
use  of  the  concordance  to  the  spiritual  men  ;  and 
let  me  draw  your  attention  to  that  other  great 
help,  both  for  Christian  living  and  Christian 
preaching — a  Bible  text-book.  And  by  this 
I  do  not  mean  a  book  like  the  birthday  text- 
book, arranged  with  a  single  text  for  every  day 
in  the  year,  though  such  a  little  manual  is  useful 
enough,  especially  for  intercessional  purposes.  I 
mean  something  more  extended  ;  such  a  book 
as  "  Daily  Light    on   the  Daily  Path  "  is  the 

8 


98  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

best  that  is  known  to  me.  It  was  of  incalculable 
comfort  to  my  wife  and  myself  when  we  were 
travelling  in  Armenia,  where  over  and  over 
again  the  promises  for  the  day  seemed  to  have 
been  especially  designed  for  the  very  needs  and 
difficulties  in  which  we  found  ourselves.  "  It  is 
a  precious  little  book "  we  often  said  one  to 
another. 

However,  I  am  not  concerned  so  much  with 
the   use   of  such    a   little  book   in  individual 
guidance  as  with  its  value  in  suggesting  subjects 
for  orderly  spiritual  meditation.     I   happen  to 
know  that  a  great  deal  of  prayer  went  to  the 
making  of  this  little  book,  and  any  one  who 
uses  it  will  come  to  see  that  it  is  a  handbook  of 
experimental   theology.     The  best  way  to   see 
this  is  to  take  a  specimen  page  or   two   and 
verify  whether  such  a  page  is  not  really  the  sub- 
structure   of  a  real  spiritual  discourse.     How 
will  the  following  bear  examination  ? 
"  October  loth. 
**  The  whole  family  in  heaven  and  earth. 
"  One  God  and  Father  of  all,  who  is  above  all, 


AND   OF   THE   BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  99 

and  through  all,  and  in  you  all.  Ye  are  all  the 
children  of  God  by  faith  in  Christ  Jesus.  That 
in  the  dispensation  of  the  fulness  of  times,  He 
might  gather  together  in  one  all  things  in 
Christ,  both  which  are  in  heaven  and  which  are 
in  earth,  even  in  Him. 

*'  He  is  not  ashamed  to  call  them  brethren. 
Behold  My  mother  and  My  brethren.  Whoso- 
ever shall  do  the  will  of  My  Father  which  is 
in  Heaven,  the  same  is  My  brother  and  sister 
and  mother.  Go  to  My  brethren,  and  say 
unto  them,  I  ascend  to  My  Father  and  your 
Father. 

"  I  saw  under  the  altar  the  souls  of  them  that 
were  slain  for  the  Word  of  God,  and  for  the 
testimony  that  they  held  :  .  .  .  and  white 
robes  were  given  unto  every  one  of  them  ;  and 
it  was  said  unto  them  that  they  should  rest  for 
a  little  season,  until  their  fellow-servants  also 
and  their  brethren,  that  should  be  killed  as 
they  were,  should  be  fulfilled.  That  they 
without  us  should  not  be  made  perfect." 

I  think  we  must  allow  that  this  little  chain  of 


IGO  THE   USE   OF   THE   CONCORDANCE 

passages  brings  before  us,  in  a  series  of  rapid 
glances  and  instantaneous  photographs,  the 
whole  structure  of  the  Church  of  God,  its  inner 
relations,  its  tribulation,  its  militancy,  and  its 
final  triumph,  in  such  a  way  as  to  contain  prac- 
tically all  that  Evangelical  theology  has  to  say 
on  the  subject. 

Here  is  another  one  of  a  more  individual  and 
experimental  character,  evidently  composed 
with  a  view  to  the  comfort  of  those  who 
are  in  the  borderland  between  this  life  and 
the  next  : — 

"November   14th. 

'*  How  wilt  thou  do  in  the  swellings  of 
Jordan  ? 

"  For  Jordan  overfloweth  all  his  banks  all 
the  time  of  harvest. 

"  The  priests  that  bare  the  ark  of  the  cove- 
nant of  the  Lord  stood  firm  on  dry  ground  in 
the  midst  of  Jordan,  and  all  the  Israelites  passed 
over  on  dry  ground,  until  all  the  people  were 
passed  clean  over  Jordan. 

"  We  see  Jesus,  who  was  made  a  little  lower 


AND   OF   THE  BIBLE   TEXT-BOOK  loi 

than  the  angels,  for  the  suffering  of  death, 
crowned  with  glory  and  honour ;  that  He  by 
the  grace  of  God  should  taste  death  for  every 
man. 

"  Though  I  walk  through  the  valley  of  the 
shadow  of  death  I  will  fear  no  evil,  for  Thou 
art  with  me,  Thy  rod  and  Thy  staff"  they  com- 
fort me.  When  thou  passest  through  the 
waters,  I  will  be  with  thee,  and  through  the 
rivers  they  shall  not  overflow  thee. 

"  Fear  not  ;  I  am  the  first  and  the  last ; 
I  am  He  that  liveth,  and  was  dead  :  and 
behold,  I  am  alive  for  evermore,  Amen  :  and 
have  the   keys  of  hell  and  of  death." 

What  a  lovely  little  liturgy  for  the  visitation 
of  the  sick  and  of  the  dying  !  How  full  of 
the  comfort  by  means  of  which  we  may  com- 
fort those  that  are  in  trouble  and  may  be 
ourselves  comforted  of  God. 

The  text-book,  when  constructed  on  the 
lines  of  "  Daily  Light,"  really  takes  precedence 
of  the  concordance  as  an  aid  to  spiritual  medi- 


I02  THE   USE  OF   THE  CONCORDANCE 

tation.  But  as  you  have  probably  noticed,  it 
has  the  concordance  behind  it  at  every  point ; 
where  it  differs  from  a  concordance  is  that 
it  does  not  proceed  so  much  from  verbal  co- 
incidence as  from  the  coincidence  and  the 
growth  of  spiritual  ideas  ;  and  it  is  these 
spiritual  ideas  that  we  want  to  bring  home, 
as  far  as  possible  in  biblical  language,  to 
our  hearers,  when  we  have  the  opportunity 
and  the  privilege  of  speaking  in  the  name  of 
our  Lord. 


THE   LORD'S   SONG   IN    A    STRANGE 
LAND 


CHAPTER    V 

THE    lord's    song    IN    A    STRANGE    LAND 

nnHE  psalm  which  we  are  going  to  study  is 
^  one  of  the  most  familiar  to  us.  Every- 
one knows  the  137th  Psalm  and  its  refrain, 
*'  How  shall  we  sing  the  Lord's  song  in  a 
strange  land  ?  "  In  one  of  its  earliest  English 
paraphrases  it  was  known  to  Shakespeare,  and 
began  something  as  follows  : — 

"  When  as  we  sat  in  Babylon, 

The  rivers  round  about, 
And  in  remembrance  of  Zion, 

The  tears  of  grief  burst  out, 
We  hanged  our  harps  and  instruments 

The  willow-trees  upon, 
For  in  that  place  men  for  their  use 

Had  planted  many  a  one." 

XQS 


io6    THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

So  that  perhaps  it  was  a  favourite  psalm  with 
our  Elizabethan  ancestors.  Of  course  we  do 
not  sing  it  all  now.  The  closing  verses  are  of 
an  imprecatory  character,  and  we  have  to  say  of 
them  what  Marjorie  Fleming  said  of  the 
murder  of  Haman's  family,  that  "  then  Jesus 
was  not  come  to  teach  us  to  be  merciful "  ;  but 
apart  from  these  closing  verses,  it  is  a  very 
simple  and  beautiful  psalm.  It  does  not  require 
very  much  criticism  in  order  to  elucidate  it,  for 
if  the  subject  of  the  psalm  is  the  Exile  of 
Israel,  we  can  only  assume  that  it  was  written 
during  the  Exile  or  after  the  return.  I  cannot 
see  that  any  other  critical  question  can  arise  as 
to  its  date.  It  would  be  quite  absurd — especi- 
ally in  view  of  the  fact  that  the  psalter  itself  is 
a  gradual  accretion,  and  this  psalm  is  near  the 
end  of  the  collection — to  imagine  that  any  one 
uttered  these  lamentations  prophetically. 

Just  in  the  same  way  as  we  are  obliged  to 
refer  to  the  time  of  the  Exile  the  passage  in 
Isaiah  which  says  that  "Our  holy  and  beauti- 
ful  house   where   our   fathers   served  Thee  is 


THE   LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      107 

burned  up,  and  all  our  pleasant  things  are  laid 
waste,"  so  we  are  obliged  to  say  that  the  137th 
Psalm  is  either  contemporary  history  or  retro- 
spective history,  and  the  only  critical  question 
relates  to  the  choice  between  these  two  alter- 
natives. 

For  myself,  I  am  quite  satisfied  that  the 
psalm  is  a  post-exilic  product,  and  that  in  it 
the  experiences  of  the  exile  are  viewed  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  return.  If  any  one  should 
feel  uncomfortable  at  the  thought  that  the  Book 
of  Psalms,  or  at  least  part  of  it,  should  be  des- 
cribed as  a  post-exilic  product,  such  an  one  may, 
perhaps,  find  consolation  in  the  fact  that  if  the 
psalm  itself  is  post-exilic,  it  is  in  evidence  for  a 
pre-exilic  psalter  ;  for  does  it  not  say,  "  for  there 
those  that  wasted  us  required  of  us  mirth  .  .  . 
and  said,  Sing  us  one  of  the  songs  of  Zion,"  so 
the  songs  were  well  known,  not  only  at  home 
but  abroad,  and  had  come  down  out  of  the  past. 

Now  let  us  try  to  realise  the  situation  for 
ourselves.  The  daughter  of  Zion  is  asked  to 
sing  by  the  daughter  of  Babel,  and  she  says, 


io8     THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

"  I  cannot  sing.  Do  you  not  see  that  I  am  in 
mourning  ?  How  should  I  sing  ?  "  The  situa- 
tion is  something  like  this.  Let  us  imagine 
ourselves  to  be  at  an  evening  party ;  in  the 
course  of  the  evening  some  one  suggests  music. 
"  There  is  Mrs.  S.,  she  is  a  beautiful  singer,  let 
us  ask  her  to  sing."  But  the  suggestion  is 
immediately  checked  by  the  observation  :  *'  On 
no  account  ;  do  you  not  see  she  is  in  mourning  ? 
She  has  lost  her  husband  ;  she  cannot  sing  !  " 
Or  the  suggestion  is  made  :  "  There  is  Mrs.  X., 
she  has  a  beautiful  contralto  voice  ;  I  will  ask 
her  to  sing  the  most  pathetic  of  all  the  Scotch 
ballads,  whether  for  words  or  music  '  Will 
Ye  No'  Come  Back  Again  ? '  "  And  again  the 
suggestion  is  checked  :  "  Do  you  not  know 
that  her  husband  has  deserted  her  ?  She 
cannot  sing  !  " 

This,  then,  is  the  situation  of  the  daughter  of 
Zion — a  deserted  wife,  a  refused  and  forsaken 
woman,  grieved  in  spirit.  And  we  can  appre- 
ciate to  some  extent  the  depth  of  her  conscious- 
ness of  desertion  by  observing  how  frequently 


THE   LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      109 

the  prophets  labour  to  remove  that  spirit  from 
the  minds  of  God's  people,  and  to  assure  them 
that  they  shall  no  more  be  termed  *'  forsaken," 
and  that,  "  though  they  may  forget,  yet  will  I 
remember  thee."  But  even  after  the  return 
from  the  Exile  Babel  was  remembered  as  a  place 
of  mourning  and  desertion,  when  it  seemed  as 
if  Jahveh  had  forgotten  Israel.  It  was  the 
place  of  the  silent  harp  and  of  the  suppressed 
song.  Those  that  carried  them  away  captive 
had  wasted  them  and  required  of  them  mirth, 
but  they  had  devastated  not  merely  the  land, 
but  the  music. 

(i)  And  now  to  proceed  to  an  orderly  dis- 
cussion of  the  subject  before  us.  We  see  in  the 
first  place  that  there  are  some  circumstances  in 
which  the  song  of  praise  seems  to  be  out  of 
place.  For  an  ideal  illustration  of  such  circum- 
stances we  might  take  the  case  of  Moore's 
"  Minstrel  Boy  "  who  went  to  the  wars  with 
his  wild  harp  flung  behind  him,  but  on  return- 
ing tore  its  strings  asunder  because  its  songs 
had  been  made  for  the  brave  and  free,  and  the 


no    THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

singing  of  them  in  slavery  was  not  to  be 
thought  of.  Or  we  might  take  an  actual 
instance  from  my  own  experience. 

I  remember  well  how  on  our  first  relief 
journey  in  Asia  Minor,  after  the  great  massa- 
cres, we  came  to  the  city  of  Malatiya,  the 
ancient  Melitene.  The  city  was  in  great  dis- 
tress. In  one  ward  only  a  single  Christian 
man  was  left  alive.  The  Protestant  Church 
was  a  heap  of  crumbling  ruins,  and  everywhere 
one  saw  the  remains  of  the  wild  orgy  of  passion 
and  violence  which  had  swept  over  the  com- 
munity. We  took  an  amateur  census  of  the 
orphans  who  were  starving  in  the  streets  of  the 
city,  and  found  over  1,500  in  number.  Now, 
obviously  in  this  situation  one  not  only  had  to 
relieve,  where  possible,  the  outward  necessities 
of  starving  people,  but  one  had  to  minister  to 
their  spirits,  so  I  arranged  for  a  Sunday  meet- 
ing in  a  certain  garden,  and  at  the  time 
appointed  the  wretched  people  crowded  into 
the  place.  It  was  difficult  to  know  how  to 
begin  a  Christian  meeting  in  the  face  of  such 


THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      m 

misery.  I  suggested  that  they  should  sing  one 
of  their  hymns,  but  they  sent  up  word  to  me  that 
since  the  massacres  they  hadn't  sung  anything, 
and  that  they  could  not  sing.  I  said  to  one  of 
the  American  missionary  ladies  by  my  side, 
"  Begin  and  sing  something  and  see  if  they  will 
join  in."  She  did  so,  and  after  a  while  first 
one  and  then  another  quavering  voice  took  up 
the  ancient  music.  The  spell  was  broken  and 
we  had  a  powerful  meeting,  but  at  all  events  it 
was  true  that  there  were  circumstances  in  which 
the  song  of  praise  seemed  to  be  out  of  place,  if 
not  impossible. 

(2)  In  those  very  circumstances,  however,  the 
evidential  power  of  the  song  is  evidently  the 
greatest.  Here,  again,  we  turn  to  our  classical 
illustration  of  song,  where  all  seems  to  forbid 
song.  ■  I  mean  the  case  of  Paul  and  Silas  in  the 
prison  of  Philippi,  where  the  stocks  and  the  inner 
prison  at  the  midnight,  following  upon  the 
scourgings  and  public  shame,  might  have  fur- 
nished a  climax  of  protest  against  the  possibility 
of  the  heavenly  music  ;  but  it  was  precisely  in 


112     THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

those  circumstances  that  the  evidential  power  of 
the  song  was  felt  when  the  prisoners  heard  them, 
and  we  may  say  that  the  songs  which  Paul  and 
Silas  sang  were  the  very  gospel  for  the  situa- 
tion, and  perhaps  the  only  gospel  possible  under 
the  circumstances. 

(3)  It  seems,  then,  that  the  very  gospel  for 
Babel  consisted  in  that  song  which  Babel  un- 
thinkingly called  for  and  which  Zion  unhappily 
could  not  sing.  Let  us  suppose  that  iji  response 
to  the  appeal  the  song  had  actually  been  sung. 
Let  it  be  one  of  the  ancient  psalms  of  the  pre- 
exilic  Psalter — say  the  23rd  Psalm,  with  its 
sacred  shadows,  and  its  spread  table,  and  its 
joy-anointed  locks.  What  would  have  been 
the  effect  upon  the  listeners  to  hear  it  said — 
"  Thou  preparest  a  table  before  me  in  the 
presence  of  mine  enemies,  and  Thou  anointest 
mine  head  with  oil,  and  my  cup  runneth  over".? 
Certainly  such  a  song  as  that  must  have  had  an 
evidential  value — even  the  enemies  themselves 
being  judges.  Or  let  us  suppose  that  instead 
of  the   ancient   Psalter  our  modern  Book  of 


THE   LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE   LAND      113 

Praise  had  been  accessible,  what  should  we  have 
sung  in  response  to  such  an  appeal,  which  would 
have  at  once  set  our  own  hearts  at  liberty,  and 
produced  conviction  in  the  minds  of  the 
oppressors  ?     Would  this  kind  of  psalm  serve  ? 

"Begone,  unbelief, 

My  Saviour  is  near, 
And  for  ray  relief 
Will  surely  appear," 

and  especially  that  verse  which,  by  the  way,  I 
see  some  of  the  hymn-books  enclose  in  brackets 
as  being  less  suitable  for  singing  or  too  extended 
an  expression  of  the  spirit  (though  it  is  the  most 
powerful  experimental  verse  in  the  hymn)  : 

"  His  love  in  times  past 

Forbids  me  to  think 
He'll  leave  me  at  last 

In  trouble  to  sink  ; 
Each  sweet  Ebenezer 

I  have  in  review 
Confirms  His  good  pleasure 

To  help  me  quite  through." 

Such  ^  psalm  as  that  may  be  doggerel   on  the 


114     THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

literary  side,  but  it  is  doggerel  which  the  be- 
lieving heart  cannot  do  without.  A  more 
polished  song  would  never  mean  the  same  to 
us — i.e.^  to  those  of  us  who  have  sung  it  in  the 
midst  of  affliction  or  in  the  face  of  death  ;  and 
certainly  if  the  song  had  been  sung  in  Babel, 
they  would  have  proved  what  Babel  half  sus- 
pected— that  Babel's  songs  could  not  compare 
with  the  songs  of  Zion  ;  thus  the  appeal  to  song, 
especially  in  unsongful  situations,  is  an  appeal 
to  discriminate  between  the  God  who  is  and 
those  who  are  called  gods  and  are  not.  The 
God  that  answereth  by  song,  let  Him  be  the 
God. 

(4)  We  have  already  seen  that  such  music 
as  convinces  souls  is  the  product  of  dark 
places  and  of  desolate  times,  at  all  events  is 
most  full  of  meaning  in  such  places  and  at 
such  times.  We  must  be  prepared  to  sing  in 
the  shade.  We  must  expect,  and  expect  joy- 
fully, that  "  in  the  night  also  His  song  shall  be 
with  me,  and  my  prayer  shall  be  to  the  God  of 
my  life,"  for  we  shall  never  be  God's  night- 


THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      115 

ingales  if  we  only  sing  by  day.  Madame 
Guyon  is  a  good  illustration  of  this  ;  she  not 
only  could  sing  in  retirement,  as  in  this 
verse — 

"  The  calm  retreat,  the  silent  shade, 
With  prayer   and  praise  agree, 
And  seem  by  Thy  sweet  bounty  made 
For  such  as  follow  Thee  ; 

There,  like  the  nightingale,  she  pours 

Her  solitary  lays, 
Nor  asks  a   witness  of  her  song. 

Nor  thirsts  for  human  praise "  ; 

but  she  belongs  to  the  singing  fraternity  of 
whom  Paul  and  Silas  are  the  patron  saints, 
for  many  of  her  most  beautiful  spiritual  songs 
were  actually  composed  either  in  the  Bastille 
or  in  the  Castle  of  Vincennes  ;  and  speaking 
of  her  own  experiences  at  such  times,  she 
says  :  "  I  regarded  myself  as  a  little  bird 
which  you  were  keeping  in  a  cage  for  your 
pleasure,  who  must  sing  to  fulfil  her  condition 
in  life.     The  stones  of  my  prison  seemed  like 


Ii6     THE  LOkD'S  SONG  IN  A  STRANGE  LAND 

rubies  ;  that  is  to  say,  I  esteemed  them  more 
than  earthly  magnificence."  The  actual  hymn 
which  she  refers  to  is  known  to  many  of 
us  ;    it  begins  like  this — 

"A  little  bird  am  I 

Shut  from  the  fields   of  air, 
And  in  my  cage  I   sit  and  sing 

To  Him  who  placed  me  there, 
Well  pleased  a  prisoner  to  be, 
Because,  my  God,  it  pleaseth  Thee." 

That  is  real  Paul  and  Silas  music. 

(5)  Now,  if  such  conviction  lurk  in  sacred 
song,  it  is  a  serious  thing  when  either  individuals 
or  communities  lose  the  power  of  praising  God ; 
for  instance,  it  is  one  of  the  sad  signs  of  the 
times  that  none  of  the  Evangelical  Churches  is 
producing  hymns.  Once  they  were  all  in  song, 
and  the  value  of  their  music  to  the  Church  at 
large  is  inestimable.  Dr.  Watts,  for  instance, 
whatever  fault  we  may  find  with  the  crudeness 
of  some  of  his  beliefs,  at  least  to  the  modern 
mind,  was  a  master  of  song,  and  left  us  many  a 


THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      117 

permanent  expression  of  the  praise  of  God  ;  and 
the  time  would  fail  me  to  tell  of  Wesley  and 
Robert  Robinson,  and  Williams  the  Welshman, 
who,  as  they  say,  "  had  the  song,"  and  Bernard 
Barton  the  Quaker  (for  even  Quakers  sing 
sometimes).  Their  music  flowed  over  from 
their  own  borders  into  the  nearer  or  more 
femote  churches,  as  in  the  case  of  Sarah  F. 
Adams,  "  Nearer  to  Thee,"  and  J.  H.  Newman, 
"  Lead,  Kindly  Light." 

When  the  great  revival  comes  again  upon  the 
Churches,  it  will  be  either  the  cause  or  the 
effect  of  sacred  song,  and  perhaps  both.  Already 
our  hymn-books  are  in  evidence  that  there  is 
such  a  thing  as  interdenominational  religion — 
however  much  it  may  please  some  people  to  talk 
of  the  Bible  as  if  it  were  a  Nonconformist  book  ! 

(6)  Now  let  us  resolve,  as  a  result  of  our 
study,  to  sing  by  Babel's  stream  and  in  Babel's 
streets.  Let  us  raise  the  songs  of  the  Flowery 
Land  in  the  Black  Country. 

Mrs.  Browning  has  given  us  a  beautiful 
illustration  of  this  in  a  poem  which  she  calls 


Ii8     THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

**  My  Doves,"  which  she  heads  with  a  quotation 
from  Goethe  to  the  following  effect :  "  Divine 
Wisdom  !  Thy  speech  is  dove-like."  ^  The 
poem  is  a  parable  drawn  from  two  little  doves 
which  she  possessed,  which  had  been  brought 
from  the  sunshine  of  India  to  the  Cimmerian 
gloom  of  London. 

"  My  little  doves  have  left  a  nest 
Upon  an  Indian  tree, 
Whose  leaves  fantastic  take  their  rest 
And  motion  from  the  sea  : 
For  ever  there  the  sea-winds  go 
With  sunlit  paces  to  and  fro. 

4:  ^  N(  4=  4: 

And  God  them  taught,  at  every  close 
Of  murmuring  waves  beyond 
And  green  leaves  round,  to  interpose 
Their  choral  voices  fond. 
Interpreting  that  love  must  be 
The  meaning  of  the  earth  and  sea. 

:|C  i|c  :):  :)c  :|< 

'Tis  hard  to  sing  by  Babel's  stream, 
More  hard   by  Babel  street  ; 


^  O  Weisheit  I  du  red'st  wie  eine  Taube 


THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      119 

But  if  the  soulless  creatures  deem 
Their  music  not  unmeet 
For  sunless  walls,  let  us  begin 
Who  wear  immortal  wings  within." 

{7)  It  may  be  inferred  from  what  has  been 
said  that  we,  upon  whom  the  obligation  of  song 
rests,  are  either  in  exile  or  on  pilgrimage. 
Sometimes  we  seem  to  be  the  one,  sometimes 
the  other.  Sometimes  we  seem  to  be  God's 
banished  ones,  and  far  from  our  heavenly  home. 
At  other  times  a  sense  of  pilgrimage  is  with  us, 
and  then  we  desire  a  fatherland,  and  declare 
plainly  that  we  are  seeking  it.  Then  the  cockle 
hat  and  shoon  become  our  most  sacred  emblems. 

I  think  it  will  be  found  that  the  best  songs  of 
the  Church  are  pilgrim  songs,  and  so  are  some 
of  the  worst  ;  by  the  worst  I  mean  those  that 
have  an  unnatural  worldliness  which  is  not  the 
true  character  of  God's  children.  It  is  one 
thing  to  say  that  "  There  is  a  land  of  pure 
delight,"  and  quite  another  thing  to  sing 
'*0  Paradise,  O  Paradise!  " 

(8)  But  if  we  are  in  exile  or  on  pilgrimage. 


I20    THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND 

then  our  life  is  characterised  by  constant  and 
unexpected  changes  ;  they  are  not  all  of  them 
what  Ruskin  would  call  "  enchanted  changes." 
Some  of  them  are  very  difficult  and  very 
menacing,  and  we  need  a  few  rules  for  the 
change  of  state  which  the  pilgrim's  condition  is 
constantly  subject  to.  One  rule  relates  to  our 
outward  gear.  We  must  rid  ourselves  of  sack- 
cloth as  being  at  once  a  superfluity  and  an 
incumbrance,  an  ugliness  and  a  discomfort. 
There  is  no  room  for  sackcloth  in  the  experience 
of  a  true  pilgrim.  It  is  not  a  New  Testament 
product ;  it  is  not  a  fabric  of  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  !  Black  is  an  un-Christian  colour.  We 
ought  not  to  put  it  even  at  the  bottom  of  our 
box  when  we  travel  ;  let  us  keep  to  the  rule, 
"  The  Lord  shall  be  thy  everlasting  light,  and 
the  days  of  thy  mourning  shall  be  ended."  In 
our  present  state  of  tarriance  we  may  expect  the 
fulfilment  of  the  promise  that  sorrow  and 
sighing  shall  flee  away.  This  means  that  in 
every  change  of  state  we  put  the  bridal  dress  on 
the  top  of  [the  trunk,  and  the  sackcloth  no- 


THE  LORD'S  SONG  IN  A   STRANGE  LAND      121 

where  ;  but  we  may  put  the  harp  on  the  top  of 
everything  else,  and  let  it  be  the  first  thing  that 
we  take  out  when  we  reach  the  next  stage  of 
our  journey  ;  thus  we  shall  open  every  new  ex- 
perience by  putting  on  the  garment  of  praise 
afresh,  and  by  singing  the  songs  of  Zion  anew. 
Then  we  shall  find  that — 

"  Through  every  changing  scene  of  life, 
In  trouble  or  in  joy, 

The  praises  of  my  God  shall  still 

My  heart  and  tongue  employ "  ; 

and  be  able  to  say  with  the  psalmist  that 
**  Thou  hast  taken  from  me  my  sackcloth  and 
girded  me  with  gladness,  to  the  end  that  my 
glory  may  sing  praise  unto  Thee  and  not  be 
silent :  O  my  God  !  I  will  give  thanks  unto 
Thee  for  ever." 


THE  TIME    MACHINE    AS    APPLIED 
TO   RELIGION 


CHAPTER    VI 

THE  TIME    MACHINE    AS    APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

\yj7K  are  most  of  us  familiar  with  the  imagina- 
^'  tive  works  of  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  and  in 
particular  with  that  invention  of  his  which  he 
calls  the  "  time  machine,"  by  means  of  which  an 
observer  at  any  given  time  and  in  any  given 
place  is  enabled  to  project  himself  into  any 
other  time,  riding  meteorically  across  the  cen- 
turies as  easily  and  as  rapidly  as  a  good  motor- 
car down  a  secluded  road  where  there  is  no 
policeman.  And  it  is  obvious  that  Mr.  Wells's 
supposed  invention  would  be  of  the  highest 
value  if  it  had  two  qualifications.  The  first  is, 
that  the  machine  should  be  fitted  with  a 
reversing  gear ;  for  of  what  use  to  us  is  the 
knowledge  of  the  future  without  its  counter- 

125 


126     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO   RELIGION 

poise  in  the  dark  backward  and  abysm  of  time  ? 
And  the  second  qualification  is,  that  the 
machine  should  be  capable  of  an  application 
to  ecclesiastical  history,  as  being  the  most 
interesting  side  of  human  history,  and  the  most 
perplexing.  No  doubt  it  will  be  at  once  urged 
that  as  the  greater  includes  the  less,  the  pro- 
blems of  Church  history  are  included  in 
universal  history,  and  that  the  former  is  only 
a  phase,  and  conceivingly  a  passing  phase,  of  the 
other.  The  one  is  a  broken  arc,  with  a  starting- 
point,  and  perhaps  a  destination,  the  other  may 
be  an  unlimited  line  extended  both  fore  and  after. 
It  would  be,  for  instance,  difficult  to  refute  a 
man  who  stated  the  proposition  that  there  was 
a  time  when  the  Church  did  not  exist,  and 
there  will  be  a  time  when  it  will  cease  to  be. 
Such  a  case  was  very  nearly  stated  by  the  late 
Dean  Stanley,  only  with  the  word  "  clergy  " 
substituted  for  "  Church."  The  analogy  of 
the  statements  shows  how  dangerous,  at  all 
events,  it  is  to  identify  the  Church  with  the 
clergy  rather    than   with   humanity   (including 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO  RELIGION    127 

the  case  where  ministers  are  supposed  to 
be  the  equivalent,  in  the  world  of  thought, 
of  their  congregations).  But  the  problem  is 
really  not  so  simple  as  Dean  Stanley  made 
it.  For  the  question  of  the  Church  and 
its  pre-existence  or  post-existence  cannot  be 
raised  without  the  question  of  the  Christ,  and 
the  early  Fathers  were  well  aware  of  the  con- 
nection between  the  two.  Long  before  the 
Council  of  Nicasa  had  elaborated  the  formula 
which  forbids  a  Christian  man  to  say  of  Christ 
that  "  there  was,  when  He  was  not,"  and  before 
the  clerical  powers,  who  habitually  sit  in  Moses's 
seat,  had,  to  use  Theodore  Parker's  phrase, 
climbed  up  also  into  the  seat  of  the  Messiah, 
we  find  early  Christian  Fathers  protesting  that 
the  true  Church  is  spiritual  and  existed  before 
the  sun  and  the  moon,  using  the  very  expressions 
which  later  theological  minds  accepted  as  the 
definition  of  the  Christ.  The  audacity  of 
these  flights  is  well  known  to  every  patristic 
student.  I  only  allude  to  them  here  with  the 
view  of  making  the  statement  that  if  any  one 


128     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

supposes  that,  by  means  of  a  Wells  motor 
adapted  to  the  study  of  human  history  and 
capable  of  motion  in  either  direction,  he  will 
soon  come  to  the  end  of  what  is  called  the 
Church,  he  will  have  to  pass  on  the  road  a 
number  of  objections  made  by  Fathers  of  the 
second  century,  such  as  Hermas  and  the  so- 
called  Second  Clement,  who  will  assure  him,  as 
he  passes,  that  his  tyres  will  be  worn  out  and  his 
petrol  exhausted  before  he  reaches  his  destination. 

Mystically,  then,  and  according  to  early 
patristic  teaching,  the  Church  is  one  of  the 
eternal  ideas,  and  exists  in  a  Pattern  in  the 
Mount.  But  we  will  not  venture  farther  on  this 
line  of  Platonic  thought  at  present.  It  is  a 
safeguard  against  the  belief  that  the  Church 
represents  our  united  capacity  for  the  main- 
tenance of  fictions.  If  we  do  not  care  to 
follow  Plato  so  far  up  stream  as  into  the 
Land  of  Eternal  Ideas,  we  may  content  our- 
selves by  saying  that  there  was  an  Ecclesia 
in  the  wilderness. 

Let    it   be   granted,  as  Euclid    says,  that   a 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     129 

time  machine  exists,  and  that  it  is  capable 
of  indefinite  motion  in  either  direction,  and 
let  it  be  applied  to  the  study  of  human  history 
on  the  side  of  religion.  The  first  thing  that 
you  would  notice  in  such  a  case  would  be  the 
following :  that,  if  you  took  an  ecclesiastic 
on  board,  he  would  instinctively  feel  after  the 
reversing  gear.  It  is  a  clerical  habit  :  but 
they  do  it,  as  St.  Paul  says  of  certain  preachers 
in  his  own  day,  not  sincerely  but  with  the  hope 
of  "adding  afflictions  to  my  bonds."  The  chief 
use  they  make  of  the  threads  of  continuity  is  to 
twist  them  into  ropes  for  flagellating  the  backs 
of  those  who  do  not  equate  Nicaea  with  Jeru- 
salem nor  think  that  Chalcedon  is  a  harmless 
variant  for  Galilee.  And  the  one  thing  they 
forget  is  that,  when  the  reversing  gear  is  once 
applied  the  machine  itself  is  capable  of  going  on 
in  the  direction  in  which  it  was  started,  and  that 
it  will  run  back,  past  priesthoods  and  behind 
sacraments  and  organisations,  and  fulfil  for 
St.    Peter,  in   a   new  sense,  the    promise   that 

"  another  shall  carry  thee  whither  thou  wouldest 

10 


I30     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO   RELIGION 

not."  What  we  describe  pictorially  is  what  is 
actually  going  on  in  the  region  of  historical 
criticism  and  in  the  domain  of  anthropology. 
But  it  is  not  every  one  who  wants  to  ride  back- 
ward. Do  you  ever  read  the  British  fVeekly  ? 
do  you  systematically  delve  in  its  pages  ?  I  do  not 
mean  in  those  pleasing  ethical  problems  to  the 
right  solution  of  which  prizes  are  attached,  nor 
to  those  pictorial  studies  of  contorted  human 
frames  which  provoked  a  grateful  writer  recently 
to  write  to  one  of  the  leading  journals  and 
thank  the  editor  for  his  interesting  articles  on 
incurable  diseases ;  I  am  not  referring  even  to 
its  politics,  breezy  and  honest  as  they  are  and 
sometimes  right ;  the  gold-mine  of  the  British 
Weekly  is  on  the  first  page  ;  the  precious  metal 
of  the  old  Gospel  protrudes  through  the  scoriae 
of  the  advertisements  of  modern  books  about 
the  Gospel.  And  it  will  probably  be  right  for 
all  of  us  to  thank  God  for  that,  in  our  time,  as 
probably  never  before,  literary  excellence  has 
been  joined  with  spiritual  insight  and  with 
evangelical     fervour     in     prologues    addressed 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO   RELIGION*  131 

to  the  people.  And  I  remember  a  remark- 
able article  which  appeared  not  long  since  on 
"  The  Future  of  the  Church,"  in  which  Dr. 
NicoU  took  a  motor  ride  down  the  ages  to 
come,  and  made  one  feel  that  if  he  had  lived 
in  the  second  century  he  would  have  written 
an  Apocalypse  of  the  first  order — an  Apoca- 
lypse, too,  that  would  contain  a  rich  and  rare 
deposit  of  jewels  from  contemporary  writers.  1 
do  not  think  Dr.  Nicoll  cares  much  for  very  early 
history  ;  apocalypse  is  much  more  his  metier. 

Now,  I  am  no  apocalyptist  :  my  business  is 
to  explore  apocalypses,  and,  if  need  be,  to 
explode  them,  to  delve  beneath  them  into 
the  historical  situations  which  produced  them 
and  the  like.  Most  of  my  work  is,  in  this 
regard,  a  backward  motion,  though  I  am  not 
an  ecclesiastic  and  run  no  risk  now  of  ever 
becoming  one ;  but  there  is  also  an  inward 
motion,  over  and  above  these  backward  and 
forward  strainings,  which  is  beyond  the  region 
of  history  and  criticism,  where  the  problem  of 
life,  considered    as   communion    with   God,  is 


132     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

opened,  expressed  in  terms  of  Its  own  and  in 
treaties  of  peace  which  no  man  knows  except 
those    who   set    their   hands    to  them.     These 
are  the  things  that  interest   me,  and  which  I 
know  also  to  interest  those  who  are  engaged  in 
the  spiritual  service  of  man.     There  is,  then, 
the  forward  outlook  or  prospect,  the  backward 
or  retrospect,  and  there  is  the  inward  or  intro- 
spect, ^«/  ihe  greatest  of  these  is  the  introspect. 
Suppose  we  really  were  able  to  get  back  to 
the  original  Christ,  to  the  first  Gospel,  and  to 
the  primitive  Church,  should  we  be  glad  of  the 
motion  "i     Should  we  rejoice  in  the  change  of 
view  ?     What   is   it    that   we    should    find    in 
primitive    Christianity?     Is   it   the  thing  that 
we  desire  to  find .''     In  any  case,  what  advan- 
tage hath  the  primitive  Christian  .?     For  it  is 
certain  that  he  had  many  disadvantages.    When 
St.  Paul  looked  backward  and  asked  a  similar 
question,    his    reply    to    the    inquiry    "  What 
advantage    hath    the   Jew.''"  was   that   he  was 
the  warden  of  the  Divine  oracles.     There  were 
other  advantages,  but  this  was  the  chief.     That 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION      133 

was  before  they  had  broken  up  the  oracles,  and 
labelled  them  with  letters  of  the  alphabet.     I 
wonder  what  St.  Paul  thinks  of  it  now.     And 
I  wonder  still  more  what  he  would,  from  our 
point  of  view,  say  when  the  question  is  asked, 
"  What    advantage    then    hath    the   primitive 
Christian  ?  "     Come,  brother  Paul,  jump   into 
your  motor  and  set  the  index  for   1908  a.d. 
and   tell  us  if  this  is  the  right  answer.     The 
advantage  of  the  primitive  Christian  is  much 
every  way,  but  chiefly  because  he  is  the  witness 
to  the  joys  of  the  kingdom  of  God,  and  because 
he  has  gladness  and  singleness  of  heart.     Is  it 
true  that  these  are  the  features  of  the  Christ 
and  of  His  Gospel  and  of  His  Church  ?   that 
he  had  them,  that  the  Gospel  proclaimed  them, 
and  that  the  Church  inherited  them  ?     If  that 
is  the  case,  and  it  should  chance  that  we  have 
lost  either  simplicity  or  sincerity,  if  our  locks 
are  dry  of  the  holy  anointing  of  gladness,  it  is 
time  some  reversing  or  proversing  or  inversing 
gear  was  set  in  motion  for  us  or  by  us. 

When  we  talk  of  going  backward,  we  have 


134    TIME  MACHINE  AS   APPLIED   TO   RELIGION 

to  remind  ourselves  that  we  are  engaged  in 
historical  and  critical  study,  and  cannot  evade 
that  kind  of  investigation.  In  actual  experience 
we  go  forward,  and  of  necessity  :  all  our  efforts 
to  think  and  act  as  the  first  century  Christians 
thought  and  acted  have  a  fault  of  impractica- 
bility. We  cannot  unthink,  when  the  race  is 
thinking,  except  to  a  very  minute  extent.  One 
sees  this  on  every  side.  For  example,  it  used  to 
be  said  of  certain  regions  of  the  study  of  man 
that  there  was  a  notice-board  put  up  to  warn 
trespassers,  inscribed  with  the  words — 

"No  Road  this  Way." — Moses. 

I  went  by  the  place  recently  and  the  old 
board  had  been  taken  down,  and  replaced  by — 

"  Vestigia  Nulla  RetrorsumJ" — Darwin. 

It  was  the  man  that  had  taken  most  steps 
backward  intellectually,  in  the  sense  of  retro- 
spective research,  who  prohibited  to-day  our 
return  to  the  beliefs  that  we  were  brought 
up  on  !  Hence,  when  we  try  to  reproduce 
previous   strata   of  thought  and  life,  we   are, 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO   RELIGION     135 

for  the  most  part,  doomed  to  miserable  failure. 
To  go  back  for  the  sake  of  going  back  is 
pure  superstition,  impracticable  superstition, 
and  there  are  things  that  no  one  would  go 
back  for,  if  he  could  ;  who  is  there  here  to-day 
who  hungers  and  thirsts  for  the  restoration  of 
the  baptism  of  the  dead  ?  And  who  is  there 
that  does  not  hunger  after  the  baptism  with  the 
Spirit  ?  What  shall  it  profit  a  man  if  he  gain 
the  whole  of  the  obsolete  and  lose  his  own  soul  ? 
But  even  a  question  like  this  requires  that  we 
should  define  the  obsolete,  and  all  is  not  obsolete 
that  seems  so.  So  we  get  into  our  car  again 
and  ascend  the  course  of  time  in  search  of  the 
non-obsolete.  The  moment  we  talk  of  such  an 
expedition,  we  are  joined  by  the  critic  and  the 
archasologist.  They,  too,  are  going  up-stream. 
"You  can  come  in  our  boat,"  they  say,  "and 
help  to  pull  it."  Meanwhile  the  inward  monitor 
whispers  its  warning  to  us.  What  advantage 
hath  the  critic  or  the  archaeologist  ?  Does  he 
recover  oracles  to  us,  or  is  he  acquainted  with 
joys  ?     The   answer,  at  first,  is  hesitating  and 


136     TIME  MACHINE   AS  APPLIED   TO   RELIGION 

uncertain.  He  does  not  make  us  superlatively 
happy,  and  if  sometimes  he  dances,  it  is  more 
often  over  the  dead  bodies  of  his  antagonists 
than  the  Davidic  measure  before  the  Ark.  He 
disappoints  us  more  often  than  he  delights  us. 
Sometimes,  indeed,  he  seems  to  offer  us  more 
gospels.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  remember  that 
your  critic  offers  you  less  gospel  when  he  is 
assiduously  talking  of  more  gospels.  It  is  not 
easy  to  see  the  advantage  of  his  judgment  and 
dissections  to  the  plain  man  or  to  the  old- 
fashioned  Sunday  School.  We  remember  that 
noble  passage  in  Erasmus's  Preface  to  his  Greek 
Testament  which  Westcott  and  Hort  trans- 
ferred to  the  title-page  of  their  Greek  Testa- 
ment. You  will  remember  how  he  speaks  of 
the  Gospels  as  containing  the  lineaments  of  that 
sacred  Mind  and  adds :  "  You  would  see  Him  less 
if  you  saw  Him  with  your  very  eyes  "  (Minus 
visurus  sisj  si  coram  oculis  conspicias).  And 
apparently  the  editor  of  the  Fourth  Gospel 
agrees  with  the  later  editors  of  the  Four 
Gospels,    in    thinking    that   much    was    super- 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     137 

fluous  which  might  be  thought  to  be  neces- 
sary. And  certainly  he  would  have  endorsed 
Erasmus  in  the  first  sentence  which  Westcott 
and  Hort  quote  from  him,  to  the  effect  that 
"  Most  literature  brings  no  small  regret  to  the 
man  who  spends  his  time  upon  it."  "  You  have 
enough,"  he  says,  and  we  most  of  us  feel  that 
something  is  to  be  said  for  him.  Indeed,  that 
must  be  enough  which,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
Fourth  Gospel,  accomplishes  the  object  of  the 
writer  to  the  reader,  viz.,  the  attainment  of  ever- 
lasting life.  And  what  advantage,  then,  has  the 
painful  retrospect  of  research,  or  the  diligence  of 
him  that  grubs  among  papyri .''  If  joy  lies  that 
way,  it  must  be,  one  would  think,  the  joy  of 
the  very  few,  and  not  the  greater  happiness  of 
the  larger  number. 

But  here  we  are  checked  in  our  thought,  and 
part  company  with  the  editor  of  the  Fourth 
Gospel.  From  this  point  of  view  a  whole 
gospel  is  not  necessary  ;  one  verse  might 
suffice  for  one  person.  In  the  same  way  a 
single   visit   to   Christ   might    suffice    for   the 


138     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

making  of  an  apostle — did  suffice  in  one  well- 
known  case.  Such  an  experience  might  make 
a  man  say,  as  Myers  makes  John  the  Baptist 
say,  "  I  carry  Jesus  with  me  till  1  die !  " 
But  no  one  who  had  known  the  Lord  that  way 
would  be  satisfied  with  his  flying  visit.  He 
would  say,  "  Rabbi,  where  dwellest  Thou  ?  "  and 
come  to  spend  the  day,  in  order  that  the  hour 
might  be  made  perfect.  He  would  say,  "  Not 
a  brief  glance  I  beg,  a  passing  word."  And 
the  real  judgment  of  the  critic  will  be  whether 
he  takes  us  in  the  end  to  the  Christ  and  leaves 
us  there.  If,  then,  the  Christ  of  the  first  days 
is  a  clearer,  lovelier  Christ  than  we  know,  or 
than  the  one  we  put  in  stained  glass  windows,  the 
going  back  to  Him  will  be  the  highest  wisdom. 
When  we  ask  a  similar  question  concerning 
the  primitive  Church,  we  are  in  a  similar  diffi- 
culty. The  Church,  like  the  gospel,  is  one  of 
the  ways  to  the  Christ.  When  we  lay  our 
hands  upon  the  Church  history,  however  stained 
and  defaced  the  record  may  be,  and,  at  first 
sight,   negative    to    faith,   there   is    a    resulting 


TIME  MACHINE   AS  APPLIED    TO  RELIGION     139 

conviction  that  here  you  have  the  gesia  Christi. 
And  the  importance  of  this  consideration  will 
be  evident  to  any  one  who  compares  the 
Christian  religion  with  the  most  active  and 
aggressive  of  its  rivals.  Take,  for  example,  the 
religion  of  Mithras,  whose  importance,  as  a 
rival  of  Christianity,  all  students  are  coming  to 
recognise.  It  is  not  merely  that  Mithraism  is 
dead,  but  there  are  no  gesta  Mithr^ ;  there 
never  were  any.  I  admit  that  there  is  much 
that  is  repellent  about  the  history  of  the 
Church.  A  fellow-student  once  said  to  me 
that  he  regarded  the  Church  history  as  the 
greatest  argument  against  Christianity.  And 
we  are  certainly  not  going  to  be  satisfied  with- 
out some  archaeological  restoration  of  the  primi- 
tive fabric.  If  we  regard  the  Church  as  a  kind 
of  gospel,  it  must,  like  the  gospel,  be  capable 
of  presentation  in  its  primitive  simplicity.  A 
mediaeval  text  will  not  do.  The  fact  is  the 
work  of  the  archaeologist  is  more  needful  for 
the  restoration  of  the  lines  of  the  original 
Church  than  it   is   for   either   the   lineaments 


140    TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

of  the  Christ  or  the  text  of  the  gospel ;  for 
in  the  latter,  at  any  rate,  whatever  be  the  state 
of  the  text,  we  can  still  say  with  the  writer  to 
the  Hebrews,  "  We  see  Jesus,"  but  in  the  life 
of  the  Church  there  are  whole  periods  where  it 
is  one  of  the  commonest  experiences  to  have  to 
say,  "  He  may  be  risen,  but  He  is  certainly 
not  here." 

It  is,  then,  a  peculiarly  evangelical  task  to  join 
hands  with  the  critic  and  the  archaeologist  in 
restoring  the  lines  of  the  first  confession  and 
retracing  the  portraits  of  the  first  confessors. 
And  we  shall  often  find  ourselves  as  the  result 
of  the  investigation  falling  into  comparisons 
made  in  Shakesperian  language,  and  saying, 
"  Look  on  this  picture — and  on  that !  "  And 
provided  the  comparisons  are  made  without 
over-exaggeration,  and  we  do  not  make  their 
heaven  too  much  higher  than  ours,  nor  contrast 
too  sombrely  this  mournful  gloom  with  that 
celestial  light,  we  may  obtain  lasting  advantage 
from  the  investigation.  Only  we  must  not  go 
back  to  smaller  views,  as  to  a  geocentric  cos- 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     141 

mology,  or  an  unnatural  psychology,  or  a  too 
lurid  eschatology,  but  simply  in  order  to  know, 
and  to  compare,  and,  if  you  please,  to  pick  up 
any  treasures  that  the  Church  may  have  dropped 
en  route. 

Dean  Stanley  records  somewhere  an  impres- 
sion made  upon  him  by  the  descriptions  of  the 
primitive  Church  in  the  Book  of  Acts,  where 
we  are  told  that  "  they  did  eat  their  meat  with 
gladness  and  singleness  of  heart !  "  He  dwells 
upon  this  passage,  not  in  order  to  get  the 
Eucharist  into  it,  but  to  deduce  the  primitive 
Christians'  joy  out  of  it.  He  expounds  the 
two  Greek  words  used,  regarding  them  as 
characteristic  of  the  Christian  experience, 
ayaWiacTLQ  and  a^EXor/jc.  The  second  of  the 
two  words  lent  itself  readily  to  comment,  as 
being  the  word  describing  the  state  of  a  field 
out  of  which  all  the  stones  have  been  gathered. 
Any  one  who  knows  Syria,  of  which  the 
Easterns  say  that  the  devil  passed  over  it  with 
a  bag  full  of  stones  and  a  hole  in  the  bottom  of 
the   bag,  will  appreciate  the  word  with  Dean 


142     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

Stanley.  But  is  it  true  that  the  result  of 
investigation  is  to  take  us  back  to  such  an 
exulting  people  and  to  such  a  well-tilled  land  ? 
A  few  moments  spent  on  the  subject  of  the 
newer  knowledge  of  the  elder  Church  may  be 
profitably  employed.  My  experience  has  been 
cast  in  a  time  when  a  stream  of  surprising 
biblical  discoveries  has  been  current.  When  I 
began  my  biblical  and  patristic  studies  almost 
the  first  thing  that  fell  across  my  path  was  the 
"Teaching  of  the  Twelve  Apostles."  It  was 
a  startling  document.  Westcott  said  of  it  that 
he  "  could  have  cried  to  find  how  different  the 
early  Church  was  from  what  he  had  imagined 
it  to  be  !  "  Not  long  after  I  was  myself  privi- 
leged to  discover  the  lost  "Apology  of  Aris- 
tides  the  Athenian  Philosopher,"  a  document 
which  was  so  altogether  altruistic  in  its  ethic, 
and  disclosed  a  people  so  utterly  happy  in  the 
faith  into  which  they  had  been  brought,  that 
one  might  have  blushed  to  find  the  difference 
between  their  spiritual  temper  and  our  own. 
Westcott's  dissatisfaction  was  with  the  outside 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO   RELIGION     143 

of  the  ancient  Church,  ours  with  the  inside  of  the 
modern  Church.  The  Teaching  of  the  Twelve 
has,  however,  a  sturdy  ethic  of  its  own,  though 
it  is  clearly  the  ethic  of  a  lower  civilisation  than 
ours.  But  it  is  a  document  that  is  fatal  to 
Catholic  claims,  that  knows  nothing,  or  next 
to  nothing,  of  Catholic  orders  or  Catholic  ritual. 
Its  Eucharist  is  certainly  not  the  mediasval  or 
modern  bread-god,  nor  its  Communion  the 
modern  fasting  Communion.  Here  is  matter 
enough  for  deploring,  for  those  who  wish  to 
deplore.  But  turn  now,  for  a  moment,  to  the 
*'  Apology  of  Aristides,"  and  read  the  descrip- 
tion of  Christian  ethics  in  the  early  part  of  the 
second  century,  and  see  how  it  tallies  with  the 
description  given  in  the  Acts  which  Dean 
Stanley  so  much  admired.  Project  yourself 
into  the  atmosphere  of  Aristides  and  his 
friends,  and  see  if  "  the  heaven's  breath  "  does 
not  "  smell  wooingly  here  !  "  How  will  this 
do  for  a  description  of  Christian  virtue  ? 

"  They    abstain    from    all    impurity,    in    the 
hope    of  the    recompense    that   is   to   come   in 


144     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO   RELIGION 

another  world.     As  for  their  servants  or  hand- 
maids, or  their  children,  if  they  have  any,  they 
persuade  them  to  become  Christians  for  the  love 
they  have  towards  them  :  and  when  they  have 
become  so,  they  call  them  without  distinction 
brethren.     They  do  not  worship  strange  gods  : 
and  they  walk  in  all  humility  and  kindness,  and 
falsehood  is  not  found  among  them,  and  they 
love  one  another.     From  the  widows  they  do 
not  turn  away  their  countenance  :  they  rescue 
the  orphan  from  him  who  does  him  violence  : 
he  who  has  gives  to  him  who  has  not,  without 
grudging.     When   they  see  the  stranger  they 
bring  him  to  their  dwellings  and  rejoice  over 
him  as  over  a  true  brother  ;   for  they  do  not 
call  brothers  those  who  are  after  the  flesh,  but 
those  who  are  in  the  spirit  and  in  God  :   but 
when  one  of  their  poor  passes  away  from  the 
world,  and   any   of   them   sees   him,   then   he 
provides  for  his  burial  according  to  his  ability  ; 
and  if  they  hear  that  any  of  their  number  is 
imprisoned  or  oppressed  for  the  name  of  their 
Messiah,  all  of  them  provide  for  his  need,  and 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     145 

if  it  is  possible  that  he  may  be  delivered,  they 
deliver  him.  And  if  there  is  among  them  a 
man  that  is  poor  and  needy,  and  if  they  have 
not  an  abundance  of  necessaries,  they  fast  two 
or  three  days  that  they  may  supply  the  needy 
with  the  necessary  food.  They  observe  scrupu- 
lously the  commandment  of  their  Messiah  : 
they  live  honestly  and  soberly,  as  the  Lord 
their  God  commanded  them  ;  every  morning 
and  all  hours  on  account  of  the  goodnesses  of 
God  toward  them  they  praise  and  laud  Him, 
and  over  their  food  and  their  drink  they  render 
Him  thanks.  And  if  any  righteous  person  of 
their  number  passes  away  from  this  world  they 
rejoice  and  give  thanks  to  God,  and  they  follow 
his  body,  as  though  he  were  moving  from  one 
place  to  another.  And  when  a  child  is  born  to 
any  of  them,  they  praise  God,  and  if  again  it 
chance  to  die  in  its  infancy,  they  praise  God 
mightily,  as  for  one  who  has  passed  through 
the  world  without  sins.  And  if,  again,  they  see 
that  one  of  their  number  has  died  in  his  iniquity 
or  in  his  sins,  over  this  one  they  weep  bitterly 


146     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO   RELIGION 

and  sigh,  as  over  one  that  is  about  to  go  to 
punishment.  Such  is  the  law  of  the  Christians 
and  such  their  conduct." 

Now,  it  is  quite  clear  that  if  we  were  by  any 
means  projected  back  into  the  religious  atmo- 
sphere described  by  Aristides,  we  should  not 
find  ourselves  amongst  a  party  of  South  Sea 
savages.  Or  if  they  were  to  come  down  to  us, 
we  should  not  be  able  to  regard  them  as  a  group 
of  undesirable  aliens.  On  the  contrary,  we 
should  either  claim  them  as  our  very  brethren, 
or  if  that  seemed  too  great  an  audacity  for 
persons  so  slack  in  charity  and  so  feeble  in 
illumination  as  ourselves,  we  should  say  of 
them,  individually  and  collectively,  "  O  cum 
talis  sis,  utinam  noster  esses."  There  can  be 
no  doubt  that  this  apologetic  picture  corre- 
sponds very  closely  to  the  "  gladness  and 
singleness  of  heart"  which  attracted  Dean 
Stanley.  These  people  must  be  of  the  same 
class  as  those  who  are  addressed  in  the  epistle 
of  Barnabas  as  rUva  ^v^poavvrig^  God's  gladsome 
bairns.     But  they  are   not  simply  a  group  of 


TIME   MACHINE   AS  APPLIED   TO   RELIGION     147 

ecstatics.  They  have  taken  forward  steps  in 
religion,  and  are  clearly  progressives.  For 
instance,  they  mark  the  abandonment  of  the 
old  Jewish  principle  of  hereditary  religion. 
There  is  not  a  trace  of  "  We  are  Abraham's 
children."  Children  are  persuaded  to  become 
Christians.  Yet  the  writer  is  sure  that  it  is 
all  right  with  children  who  die  young.  The 
magic  of  baptism  is  absent  (I  do  not  say  that 
baptism  is  absent).  They  must  have  taken 
somewhere  a  forward  step  in  declining  the 
fiction  of  child  membership  and  in  insisting  on 
the  sincerity  of  man  and  woman  membership. 
"  For  the  love  that  they  have  to  them,  they 
persuade  them  to  become  Christians."  Where 
persuasion  is,  there  is  multiplication  and  exten- 
sion ;  where  it  is  not  or  where  the  result  of  it 
is  assumed,  there  is  spiritual  decline  and  dis- 
integration. Consider,  too,  their  extraordinary 
solidarity.  We  remember  how  the  French, 
who  started  with  a  formula  of  liberty,  equality, 
and  fraternity,  have  begun  to  change  the 
formula   by    the    substitution    of  "solidarity" 


148     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO   RELIGION 

for  "fraternity."  The  latter  word  seems  to 
them  to  be  too  individualistic  and  to  express 
imperfectly  the  unity  of  the  human  race,  and 
the  ideals  which  spring  from  the  thought  of 
that  unity.  The  early  Church  had  both 
fraternity  and  solidarity — fraternity  in  the 
highest  sense  ;  for  they  do  not  call  those 
brethren  who  are  after  the  flesh,  but  those  who 
are  in  the  spirit  and  in  God.  They  call  them 
without  distinction  brethren  !  The  same  thing 
comes  out  in  the  matter  of  solidarity — "  He 
who  has  gives  to  him  who  has  not  without 
grudging."  Examine  also  their  treatment  of 
the  stranger,  the  regulations  for  the  burial  of 
the  dead,  the  deliverance  of  those  who  are 
imprisoned  for  the  sake  of  the  Messiah. 
These  are  features  of  genuine  solidarity  : 
many  of  the  customs  referred  to  persist,  or 
reappear  in  the  great  mediaeval  guilds,  which 
are  really  Churches  in  petto.  How  contagious 
must  that  happiness  of  theirs  have  been,  when 
it  even  prescribed  laws  to  Death,  that  he  should 
not    cast   a   shade    upon   a   Christian    burial. 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     149 

"  They  rejoice  greatly ;  they  follow  his  corpse 
as  if  it  were  the  removal  of  an  emigrant  that 
they  were  celebrating  !  "  This  feature  of  early 
Christian  life  is  the  more  remarkable  because 
it  is  just  at  this  point  of  contact  with  Death  that 
the  human  race  is  most  conservative,  and  each 
generation  insists  upon  being  the  model  to  the 
next.  But  you  cannot  find  any  trace  of  black 
or  sordid  raiment  amongst  the  Christians  whom 
we  are  considering.  They  rejoice  over  the 
departed  :  they  rejoice  with  the  departed  : 
only  one  exception  is  made,  the  case  of  the 
wilfully  impenitent.  Few  things  will  show 
more  clearly  than  this  case  of  *'  gladness  and 
singleness  of  heart "  what  the  early  Church  was 
like,  and  what  the  later  Church  became.  My 
discovery,  if  I  may  say  so,  is  greater  than 
Tischendorf's  on  the  same  holy  mountain. 
For  while  his  upset  the  traditional  text,  mine 
upsets  the  traditional  practice.  One  ethical 
variant  is  worth  fifty  biblical  emendations.  A 
modern  critic — 1  think  it  was  the  late  Dr. 
Salmon — said  of  the  changes  in  the  organisation 


150     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION 

of  the  early  Church,  and  the  transition  from  the 
original  Presbyteral  government  to  the  later 
Episcopal  rule,  that  the  Church  of  the  second 
century  passed  into  a  tunnel.  We  saw  it  enter 
and  we  saw  it  emerge,  but  the  evidence  of  what 
went  on  between  the  two  known  historical 
points  is  obscure.  What  Dr.  Salmon  says  of 
the  organisation  of  the  early  Church  we  say  of 
their  experience — it  passed  through  a  tunnel. 
But  Dr.  Salmon  could  not  say,  and  it  was 
hardly  proper  for  him  to  say  of  the  mere 
outwardness  of  the  Church,  whether  the  tunnel 
took  them  from  a  more  favoured  region  into 
the  contrary,  or  whether  conversely  they 
passed  into  clearer  lights  and  larger  liberties. 
In  the  matter  of  experience,  however,  we  can 
speak  with  some  confidence  ;  they  passed  from 
Italy  in  sunshine  into  Switzerland  in  shade  or 
in  snow  :  and  with  some  exceptions  they  have 
remained  on  the  colder  and  darker  side  of  the 
range  of  mountains  through  which  they  have 
passed.  And  if  this  be  so,  it  is  a  lawful  feature 
of  the  return  to  the  Christ  and  to  the  Scriptures 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     151 

and  the  Church  to  desire  that  we  may  get  back 
again  into  primitive  heart-happiness.  Or  if  some 
one  shall  object  to  our  pictures  as  being  over- 
coloured,  then  it  must  be  our  most  gracious 
mark  that  we  desire  to  get  forward  into  real 
heart-happiness,  for  it  will  be  as  true  of  us 
as  it  was  of  Paul  and  his  Philippian  friends, 
that  we  are  the  circumcision  (i.e.,  the  real  people^ 
who  worship  God  in  the  Spirit,  rejoice  in  Christ 
Jesus,  and  have  no  confidence  in  the  flesh. 

When  Goldsmith  described  his  ideal  parson, 
he  drew  the  climax  of  his  qualification  in  the 
fact  that  he  "  allured  to  brighter  worlds  and 
led  the  way."  As  the  passage  is  no  clerical 
preserve,  but  the  description  of  all  faithful  souls, 
I  will  repeat  a  line  or  two  more  of  it  : — 

"  And  as  a  bird  each  fond  endearment  tries, 
To  lure  her  new-fledged  offspring  to  the  skies, 
He  tried  each  art,  reproved  each  dull  delay, 
Allured  to  brighter  worlds  and  led  the  way." 

It  does  not  need  any  recovery  of  ancient 
documents  to  tell  us  that  we  ought  to  be 
more  alluring  than  we  are.     All  around   is  a 


152     TIME   MACHINE   AS  APPLIED    TO  RELIGION 

new-fledged  ofi^spring,  which  has  not  yet  found 
its  wings  or  its  songs.  They  can  only  flutter, 
they  do  but  twitter.  It  is  a  high  caUing  to  be 
alluring  in  Christ's  stead,  a  wonderful  caUing. 
He  can  make  every  bird  that  He  snares  into 
a  decoy,  every  fish  that  He  catches  into  a  bait, 
or  into  a  fisherman,  every  captive  into  a  loyal 
soldier.  All  genuine  Christian  experience  is 
alluring.  The  man  who  escapes  the  horrible 
pit  and  sings  his  new  song  on  the  margin  of 
the  miry  clay  is  alluring.  The  man  who  stands 
firm  where  Christ  has  set  him  sentry  is  allur- 
ing :  a  wreath  of  heaven's  laurel  is  already 
materialising  over  his  head.  The  man  who 
breasts  Jordan's  waves  and  shouts  on  the  banks 
of  deliverance  is  alluring  :  let  me  die  the  death 
of  the  righteous,  let  my  last  end  be  like  his. 
But  it  is  not  only  the  man  strenuous  in  action 
or  strong  in  death  that  is  winsome.  Anywhere, 
everywhere,  the  soul  made  happy  in  Christ's 
love  is  alluring. 

You  remember  that  famous  passage   in  the 
"  Grace  Abounding  "  where  John  Bunyan  tells 


TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED   TO  RELIGION     153 

how  his  spirit  was  quickened  by  hearing  some 
poor  women  who  sat  in  the  sun  and  told  their 
experiences.  "  Methought  they  spake  as  if  joy 
did  make  them  speak ! "  Good  gospel  that,  with 
good  illustration  of  gospel  in  the  sunshine  where 
they  were  sitting.  But  it  would  be  equally 
good  gospel  if  they  had  sat  in  the  shade,  and 
joy  had  made  them  speak.  The  fact  is  that  it 
is  at  this  point  that  we  are  certain  to  become 
powerful  preachers.  There  is  always  some  one 
overhearing  our  happiness.  The  typical  illus- 
tration in  the  Scripture  is  well  known,  Paul  and 
Silas  in  prison,  in  the  inner  prison,  in  the  stocks, 
at  midnight,  with  sore  backs  and  glowing  hearts, 
singing  praises.  As  I  heard  some  one  once  say, 
"  we  should  hardly  have  got  beyond  a  prayer- 
meeting."  In  that  case  the  allurement  would 
have  been  wanting,  for  the  attraction  was  in  the 
song,  and  it  is  song  that  makes  song. 

"  What  is  this  psalm  from  pitiable  places, 
Glad  where  the  messengers  of  peace  have  trod  ? 
Whose  are  these  beautiful  and  holy  faces. 
Lit  with  their  loving  and  aflame  with  God  ? " 


154     TIME  MACHINE  AS  APPLIED    TO  RELIGION 

From  all  of  which  it  appears  that  the  attraction 
of  the  Christian  religion  does  not  consist  in  the 
internal  harmony  or  splendour  of  its  doctrines 
(much  less  of  its  rites  or  buildings),  but  in  the 
experience  of  its  worshippers.  There  is  a  chain 
of  Catholic  joy,  as  well  as  a  transmission  of 
Catholic  doctrine.  Each  nightingale  teaches 
the  next  its  note.  It  is  as  necessary  to  be 
sound  in  the  happiness  of  the  faith  as  it  is 
to  be  sound  in  the  faith.  To  be  happy  in 
God  and  in  God's  will  is  the  highest  ortho- 
doxy that  His  creatures  are  capable  of :  and  we 
shall  certainly  allure  to  brighter  worlds  when 
we  ourselves  live  in  them.  From  such  an  in- 
ward spring  may  we  preach  and  teach  and  live, 
and  by  it  fulfil  the  description  given  in  one  ot 
the  apocryphal  books  of  the  service  of  those 
who  become  "  friends  of  God  and  prophets," 
that  "  in  the  time  of  their  visitation  they  shall 
shine,  and  run  to  and  fro  like  sparks  among 
the  stubble." 


THE   GIFT  OF  THE   HOLY  SPIRIT 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE    GIFT    OF    THE    HOLY    SPIRIT 

'"P'HE  Christian  Church  has  a  calendar  of 
'*•  festivals  that  are  to  be  observed  through- 
out the  course  of  each  year ;  and  although 
some  branches  of  the  Church  have  longer  and 
more  highly  evolved  calendars  than  others,  it 
will  probably  be  correct  to  say  that  every 
Church  has  something  in  the  nature  of  a 
calendar.  The  most  extended  calendar  is  that 
of  the  Roman  Church,  followed  closely  by 
those  of  the  Greek  and  other  Oriental  Churches, 
calendars  which  contain,  not  only  festivals  com- 
memorative of  the  leading  events  in  the  life  of 
Christ  and  the  fortunes  of  His  people,  but 
which   also   include   many  fictitious    memorials 

157 


IS8  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

designed  (as  I  have  elsewhere  shown)  to  incor- 
porate the  cult  of  pagan  deities  and  heroes, 
often  under  the  thinnest  of  disguises. 

If  the  Roman  calendar  is  the  most  highly 
evolved,  we  may  place  at  the  opposite  scale  the 
calendar  of  the  Society  of  Friends,  which  is 
limited  to  the  selection  of  a  particular  week  in 
the  month  of  May  for  the  purposes  of  an 
Annual  Meeting  ;  and  between  these  two 
extremes  we  may  group  the  various  calendars 
of  the  individual  Churches.  Now,  it  will 
readily  be  seen  that  all  the  Churches  which 
keep  a  series  of  Christian  festivals  throughout 
the  year  do  so  with  the  intention,  as  far  as 
possible,  of  co-ordinating  those  festivals  in  a 
proper  sequence.  They  do  this  almost  of 
necessity,  for  is  not  the  calendar  intended  to 
serve  as  a  mirror  of  the  Life  of  Christ,  reduced 
to  one  Annus  Mirabilis^  one  acceptable  year  of 
the  Lord?  In  that  case  history  will  enforce 
sequence,  and  there  will  be  a  reason  why  certain 
festivals  occur  in  a  certain  order. 

But    then,    this   order   will    be    not    merely 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  159 

natural,  as  reflecting  historical  events,  but  it 
will  endeavour  to  express  spiritual  truth  in  the 
language  of  history,  and  unless  it  did  so  the 
Christian  year  would  lose  much  of  its  beauty 
and  meaning.  It  is  something  more  than 
history  which  tells  us  that  Good  Friday  does 
not  fall  in  Easter  week  ;  it  is  spiritual  necessity 
which  places  Good  Friday  and  Easter  in  a 
certain  order,  for,  as  the  Apostle  says,  "  if  we 
be  dead  with  Christ,  we  shall  also  live  with 
Him "  ;  or,  as  the  Salvation  Army  lassie  said 
when  she  was  telling  her  experience,  "  I  had  to 
learn  that  Good  Friday  came  before  Easter 
Day."  There  is,  then,  a  sequence  and  co- 
ordination observable  in  the  festivals  of  the 
Church,  which  is  especially  patent  in  the  case 
of  a  pair  of  closely  related  festivals  whose 
nexus  is  not  merely  natural  but  spiritual.  I 
suppose  every  one  will  recognise  this  in  the 
case  which  I  have  brought  forward,  because 
Good  Friday  and  Easter  are  hardly  two 
separate  festivals  at  all  ;  but  the  case  is  not 
so  simple  nor  the  fact  so  readily  observed  in 


l6o  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

the  case  of  another  pair  of  festivals  to  which 
we  must  now  draw  attention.  I  mean  the 
Ascension  of  Christ  and  the  Descent  of  the 
Holy  Ghost.  One  does  not  instinctively  con- 
nect Ascensiontide  and  Whitsuntide  together  ; 
the  historical  links  are  obscure  and  the  spiritual 
links  are  not  obvious,  except  to  those  who 
search  for  them.  There  is  a  great  difference 
in  kind  between  the  two  festivals  of  Ascension 
Day  and  Whitsunday.  The  former  is  a  festival 
of  heaven,  the  latter  belongs  entirely  to  the 
experience  of  the  Church  on  earth.  If  we 
consider  the  first  Ascension  record,  we  can  only 
say  it  is  so  brief  as  hardly  to  be  a  record  at  all. 
It  amounts  to  this,  that  Jesus  blessed  His  dis- 
ciples and  disappeared.  They  had  no  triumph, 
no  rapture,  no  exultation  ;  only  there  was  a  per- 
plexity in  the  minds  of  disciples  who  were  too 
ignorant  as  yet  to  appreciate  what  had  happened 
and  yet  wise  enough,  in  view  of  what  they  did 
know,  not  to  relapse  into  unbelief  or  its  com- 
panion, grief,  over  what  they  were  not  able 
to  comprehend.     The  Ascension,  then,  was  a 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  i6i 

festival  of  heaven  ;  it  was  there  that  the  bells 
were  ringing,  not  in  the  most  heavenward- 
reaching  of  our  towers  ;  it  was  there  that  they 
unloosed  the  bars  of  massy  light  and  let  the 
King  of  Glory  in  ;  it  was  the  angelic  company 
that  had  the  rapture,  who  had  followed  Him 
all  His  life  through — 

"  Oft  wondering  where  and  how  at  last 
The  mystic  scene  would  end. 
***** 
They  brought  His  chariot  from  above 

To  bear  Him  to  His  throne, 
Spread  their  triumphant  wings  and   cried, 

'  The  glorious  work  is  done  ! '  " 

In  a  word,  they  crowned   Him  Lord  of  all ; 

but  of  the  fact  of  the  coronation,  in  any  sense 

that   should   provoke  a   festival    record,  there 

does  not  seem  to  have  been  a  suspicion  in  the 

minds  of  the  primitive  believers.     And  it  was 

not  until  ten  days  afterward  that  the  news  of 

heaven  became  the  property  of  earth,  and  the 

saints  below  began  to  sing  in  concert  with  those 

that  were  above  and    to   say  that    "  God   has 

la 


i62  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

made  this  same  Jesus  both  Lord  and  Christ," 
"  He  is  by  the  right  hand  of  God  exalted,  He 
has  received  of  the  Father  the  promise  of  the 
Spirit,"  which  we  now  experience.  They  had 
linked  together  the  two  festivals  and  made  the 
conjunction  of  heavenly  and  terrestrial  bliss. 
It  is,  therefore,  quite  clear  that  these  two 
festivals  are  a  co-ordinated  sequence.  The 
Pentecost  becomes  intelligible  when  it  is  seen 
to  be  a  festival  of  the  exalted  and  glorified 
Christ.  So  much  having  been  said  with  regard 
to  the  calendar  and  its  external  apparatus  for 
the  illustration  of  spiritual  things,  let  us  try 
to  get  at  the  spiritual  things  themselves.  For 
at  its  best  the  calendar  is  only  a  help,  and 
a  help  that  easily  passes  over  into  a  hindrance 
if  we  limit  ourselves  too  much  to  days  and 
times.  When,  for  example,  we  are  reading 
George  Herbert's  verses  on  Whitsunday  and 
find  him  pleading  for  the  restoration  of  this 
day  to  its  ancient  and  miraculous  right,  we  are 
obliged  to  stop  and  ask  ourselves  whether  the 
crowning  Pentecostal  experience  can  really  be 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  163 

limited  to  a  particular  calculated  and  appointed 
day.  We  may  agree  in  the  main  with  the 
poet's  desire  : — 

"  Lord,  though  we  change,  Thou  art  the  same, 
The  same  dear  God  of  Love  and  Light  ; 
Restore  this  day,  for  Thy  most  holy  name, 
Unto  his  ancient  and  miraculous  right  "  ; 

but  when  we  have  affirmed  the  unchangeable- 
ness  of  God  in  His  power  and  grace  and  in 
His  willingness  to  fill  His  people  with  the 
sense  of  His  presence,  we  must  not  take  away 
from  the  thought  by  imposing  upon  it  a 
calendar  limitation.  The  experience  of  Pente- 
cost is  not  marked  by  any  other  chronology 
than  that  of  obedience  and  faith  ;  and  these 
will  make  a  Pentecost  anywhere  and  at  any 
time.  Perhaps  we  shall  see  this  more  clearly 
if  we  turn  to  the  account  of  the  great  and 
notable  day  in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  ;  when 
we  do  so  we  find  that  the  stress  is  laid  on 
time,  place,  and  concord  :  a  day  fully  come,  a 
place  conformed  to  the  habit  of  an  expectant 


l64  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

people,  and  a  united  spirit  of  faith.  Now, 
suppose  we  ask  the  question,  Which  of  these  is 
the  most  important,  in  which  quarter  did  the 
magic  lie,  from  whence  did  the  grace  proceed  ? 
From  the  time  ?  Not  necessarily,  for  the 
phenomenon  repeated  itself  many  times.  From 
the  place  ?  No,  for  it  occurred  outside  Jeru- 
salem, however  much  it  began  in  and  from 
Jerusalem.  From  the  concord  ?  Certainly 
this  is  the  mark  of  every  such  outpouring  and 
visitation  ;  it  is  the  result  of  an  understanding 
between  God  and  man  and  between  one  man 
and  his  brethren.  Thus  we  arrive  at  the 
underlying  truth  that  ihe  day  of  Ventecost  was 
not  a  day^  but  an  agreement. 

We  are  now  far  away  from  the  calendar  and 
well  on  the  road  towards  the  heavenly  things 
themselves. 

And  now  let  us  see  some  of  the  features 
which  made  this  visitation  of  God  so  great  and 
notable  ;  let  us  come  to  the  experience  itself. 

We  will  speak  of  it  in  two  of  its  results : 
first,  as  being   an    equipment   in    personality ; 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE   HOLY  SPIRIT  165 

second,  as  being  the  reception  of  the  apostolic 
and  Christian  credentials. 

Now,  with  regard  to  personality,  may  we  not 
say  that  the  Holy  Spirit  is  the  missing  factor  in 
our  personality,  and  that  without  it  we  cannot 
be  altogether  ourselves,  as  God  wants  us  to  be  ? 
For  we  notice  that  an  abiding  gift  means  an 
abiding  change  in  the  person  to  whom  the  gift 
is  made  ;  and  this  is  an  abiding  Gift :  it  is  said 
that "  He  shall  abide  with  you  for  ever,"  and  *'  we 
will  come  unto  Him  and  make  our  abode  with 
Him."  So,  then,  if  the  Holy  Spirit  is  a  Divine 
Abiding,  the  result  of  the  gift  will  be  found 
in  personal  equipment  and  change.  The  fact 
being,  as  we  have  stated,  that  we  cannot  be 
completely  ourselves  apart  from  the  presence 
and  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  we  are  obliged  to 
recognise  that  He  operates  as  transforming 
grace  in  the  conversion  and  in  the  sanctifica- 
tion  of  the  souls  of  men,  and  to  this  all  the 
saints  bear  witness.  To  keep  the  matter  simple, 
and  to  keep  it  also  forcible,  we  will  call  for  a 
few   testimonies  as  to  what  the  work   of  the 


i66  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

Holy  Spirit  in  the  transformation  of  personality 
is  like.  Here  is  one,  to  begin  with,  of  a  very 
simple  character  : — 

"It  was  in  November,  1823,  but  what  day 
of  the  month  I  do  not  know.  I  remember  this, 
that  everything  looked  new  to  me — the  people, 
the  fields,  the  cattle,  the  trees.  I  was  like  a  new 
man  in  a  new  world.  I  spent  the  greater  part 
of  my  time  in  praising  the  Lord.  I  could  say 
with  Isaiah,  '  O  Lord,  I  will  praise  Thee,  for 
though  Thou  wast  angry  with  me,  thine  anger 
is  turned  away  and  Thou  comfortedst  me '  ;  or 
like  David, '  The  Lord  hath  brought  me  up  out 
of  a  horrible  pit  of  mire  and  clay,  and  set  my 
feet  upon  a  rock,  and  established  my  goings, 
and  hath  put  a  new  song  into  my  mouth,  even 
praise  to  my  God.'  1  was  a  new  man  alto- 
gether. I  told  all  that  I  met  what  the  Lord 
had  done  for  my  soul.  I  have  heard  some  say 
that  they  have  had  hard  work  to  get  away  from 
their  companions,  but  I  sought  mine  out,  and 
had  hard  work  to  tell  them  what  the  Lord  had 
done  for  me.     Some  said  I  was  mad,  and  others 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  167 

that  they  should  get  me  back  again  next  pay- 
day. But,  praise  the  Lord !  it  is  now  more  than 
forty  years,  and  they  have  not  got  me  yet. 
They  said  I  was  a  maci-rm.ny  but  they  meant  I 
was  a  glacl-ma.n,  and,  Glory  be  to  God  !  I  have 
been  glad  ever  since." 

Such  was  the  striking  experience  of  that 
apostolic  man  Billy  Bray,  the  Cornish  miner,  at 
whose  feet  we  have  often  sat  in  the  spirit  ;  a 
position  which  has  not  needed  any  apologetic 
explanation  in  modern  times,  since  Professor 
James,  of  Harvard,  has  re-discovered  Billy  and 
put  him  in  his  gallery  of  Varieties  of  Religious 
Experience.  Observe  the  note  of  this  testi- 
mony, the  conscious  sense  of  personal  renewal 
by  the  Holy  Spitit.  Here  is  another  well- 
known  example  from  another  quarter,  belonging 
to  a  somewhat  more  advanced  experience,  but 
inwardly  parallel  to  the  one  we  have  just  quoted. 
George  Fox  tells  us  of  a  certain  wonderful  visi- 
tation of  heavenly  life  that  he  experienced,  as 
follows  : — 

"  Now  was  I  come  up  in  Spirit,  through  the 


i68  THE   GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

flaming  sword,  into  the  paradise  of  God.  All 
things  were  new,  and  all  the  creation  gave 
another  smell  unto  me  than  before,  beyond 
what  words  can  utter.  I  knew  nothing  but 
pureness,  innocence,  and  righteousness  ;  so  that 
I  was  come  up  to  the  state  of  Adam,  which  he 
was  in  before  he  fell." 

Clearly  here  is  another  new  man  talking ;  his 
symbols  are  mystical,  but  there  is  no  doubt  in 
his  mind,  or  in  ours,  that  he  has  undergone  a 
transformation.  We  may  not  quite  understand 
about  the  flaming  sword,  but  since  we  find  the 
man  carving  it  upon  his  seal,  and  mentioning 
this  particular  seal  in  his  will,  there  can  be  no 
doubt  of  the  importance  of  the  experience  to 
him.  It  had  made  him  other  than  he  was  and 
more  than  he  had  been.  It  was,  as  his  subse- 
quent life  showed,  an  apostolic  equipment,  a 
personal  renewal. 

And  here  is  another  testimony  equally  decided, 
and  in  many  ways  quite  similar  to  the  preceding. 
Madame  Guyon  tells  us  of  a  certain  remarkable 
spiritual  experience  of  hers  as  follows  : — 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  169 

"  My  heart  was  quite  changed  ;  God  was 
there  ;  from  that  moment  He  had  given  me  an 
experience  of  His  presence  in  my  soul — not 
merely  as  an  object  intellectually  perceived,  but 
as  a  thing  really  possessed  after  the  sweetest 
manner,  I  experienced  those  words  in  the 
Canticles,  '  Thy  name  is  as  precious  ointment 
poured  forth  :  thereforth  do  the  virgins  love 
Thee.'  For  I  felt  in  my  soul  an  unction  which 
healed  in  a  moment  all  my  wounds.  I  slept 
not  all  that  night,  because  Thy  Love,  O  my 
God,  flowed  in  me  like  delicious  oil,  and  burned 
like  a  fire  that  was  going  to  destroy  all  that  was 
left  of  self  in  an  instant.  I  was  all  of  a  sudden 
so  altered  that  I  was  hardly  to  be  known  either 
by  myself  or  by  others.  I  found  no  more  those 
troublesome  faults,  or  that  reluctance  to  duty 
which  formerly  characterised  me.  They  all 
disappeared,  as  being  consumed  like  chaff  in  a 
great  fire." 

Here  we  have  again  the  same  testimony  to 
personal  renewal  and  expansion  and  completion 
through  the  indwelling  of  the  blessed   Spirit ; 


I70  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

and  the  two  or  three  witnesses  coming  from 
such  opposite  points  of  view  to  the  same  con- 
clusion may  be  a  sufficient  establishment  of  the 
reality  of  the  work  of  which  they  speak. 

Now  let  us  think  of  the  way  in  which  this 
visitation  of  the  Holy  Ghost  furnishes  the 
credentials  for  Divine  service.  St.  Ephraem  the 
Syrian  tells  us  that  the  children  of  Israel 
believed  Moses  when  he  came  down  from  the 
mountain  because  the  rays  of  light  from  his 
face  furnished  a  testimony  to  the  truth  of  his 
word  !  It  was  necessary  that  Moses  should 
have  credentials,  for  "whereby  shall  it  be  known 
that  Thou  hast  sent  me  .? "  the  man  might  ask. 
So  Moses  came  down  from  the  mountain,  sup- 
ported, not  by  the  conventional  two  or  three 
witnesses  who  shall  confirm  his  word,  but  by 
two  or  three  thousand  convincing  and  convert- 
ing sunbeams,  declaring  without  fear  of  contra- 
diction that  "  this  man  is  come  to  you  with  a 
message  from  your  Lord."  The  right  preaching 
is  that  in  which  something  about  the  man  com- 
mends the  message.    And  we  may  say,  therefore. 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  171 

that  it  is  of  the  nature  of  a  true  Pentecostal 
experience  to  produce  a  congruity  between  the 
message  and  the  messenger.  Now  certainly  this 
was  the  case  with  our  Lord  Himself.  The 
people  who  heard  Him  were  blessed  before  ever 
he  opened  His  mouth  and  said,  "Blessed  are 
ye."  They  were  rested  before  ever  He  said, 
"  I  will  give  you  rest."  The  Gospel  was 
Christ  even  more  than  it  was  the  word  of 
Christ  ;  and  there  was  a  perfect  congruity 
between  the  Christ-Person  and  the  Christ-word. 
And  this  being  his  experience,  we  may  be 
sure  that  something  like  it  appears  in  the  ex- 
periences of  the  apostolic  men  and  women,  the 
earlier  and  later  saints,  and  believers  generally. 
They  have  a  gospel  which  has  to  be  proclaimed, 
but  it  has  also  to  be  commended  ;  it  has  to  be 
announced,  but  it  has  also  to  be  adorned.  The 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  to  be  spoken  of,  but  it 
must  be  within  those  who  speak  :  to  have  it 
around  us  or  among  us  will  not  suffice,  when 
He  said  it  was  to  be  within  us.  The  Pente- 
costal congruity  between  the  Messenger  and  the 


172  THE   GIFT  OF   THE   HOLY  SPIRIT 

Message  arises  from  this  inward  experience,  this 
reign  of  God  in  the  heart  and  conscience.  And 
it  is  this  visitation  which  puts  the  beauty  of  the 
Lord  upon  His  willing  people,  and  when  it  is 
there  the  question  is  sure  to  be  asked  concern- 
ing those  who  are  in  the  lesser  apocalypse  which 
is  asked  of  the  triumphant  saints  in  the  larger 
vision  :  "  What  are  these,  and  whence  came 
they  ? "  And  the  Holy  Ghost  will  fall  on 
those  who  hear  the  word,  when  it  has  first 
fallen  upon  those  who  speak  the  word.  It 
will  make  them  able  where  they  have  before 
been  weak  ;  it  saves  them  from  impotence, 
reluctance,  and  disability.  It  takes  the  words, 
"  I  can't  "  out  of  the  vocabulary,  and  writes 
over  the  vacant  space  instead,  *'  I  can  do  all 
things  through  an  indwelling  and  strengthen- 
ing Christ."  Negatively  also  it  removes  from 
the  life  those  wayward  desires  which  choke  the 
word,  impede  the  life,  and  postpone  the  king- 
dom. Thus  the  visitation  of  the  Holy  Ghost 
is  only  another  way  of  describing  the  effect 
which  Christ  has  upon  willing  and  surrendered 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  173 

souls  :  the  visitation  is,  in  fact,  the  vision.  It 
instructs  us  to  follow  after  Him,  and  to 
become  fishers  of  men.  It  does  in  continuance 
what  a  single  visit  or  interview  used  to  do  in 
the  days  of  His  flesh.  It  is  not  a  different 
kind  of  grace  frt)m  that  which  came  to  the 
woman  of  Samaria,  when  a  single  talk  with 
One  who  told  her  all  that  ever  she  did  made 
her  an  evangelist  and  (may  we  not  say  .?)  an 
apostle. 

And  to  her  also  He  spoke  of  an  inward 
fountain  which  should  spring  up  into  an 
eternal  life  ;  and  it  would  be  difficult  to 
describe  Pentecost  and  its  experience  in  more 
exact  terms.  The  fact  is  that  the  Samaritans 
of  her  day  believed  her  in  precisely  the  same 
way  as,  at  a  later  date,  they  believed  the  word 
of  the  apostles  themselves  when  they  came 
down  to  them  with  the  freshness  and  glory  of 
the  Upper  Chamber,  and  brought  great  joy 
with  them.  In  the  one  case  they  believed  a 
shaded  one  that  had  abruptly  turned  into  a 
shining  one  ;  in  the  other  they  received  and 


174  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

believed  the  word  of  a  company  of  shining 
ones.  But  if  Churches  go  back  in  search  of 
apostolic  foundations,  Samaria  will  go  back 
farther  than  St.  Peter  or  St.  John.  But  in 
any  case  the  credentials  were  the  same,  the 
joy  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  the  love  of  God  shed 
abroad  in  the  heart. 

Perhaps  it  will  be  thought  that  we  are 
unduly  restricting  the  credentials  in  thus 
emphasising  the  necessity  and  importance  of 
the  Pentecostal  experience.  Was  there  no 
creed  promulgated  on  that  elect  day,  nothing 
which  should  distinguish  between  sheep  and 
goats,  between  orthodox  and  unorthodox  ;  no 
book  of  rules  nor  handbook  of  discipline,  no 
articles  of  religion  nor  of  catholicity  in  religion  ? 
Apparently  none  of  these  things  belongs  in  the 
Pentecostal  connection.  As  far  as  orthodoxy 
goes,  they  were  orthodox  already,  Thomas  as 
orthodox  as  John,  however  long  it  may  have 
taken  him  to  get  there.  Pentecost  adds  nothing 
to  the  equipment  of  doctrines  :  it  adds  every- 
thing to  the  equipment  of  the  teachers.     The 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  175 

equipment  of  doctrine  stands  where  it  did.  It 
is  expressed  in  words  like  these  out  of  the  past 
of  the  learners  :  "  Lord,  I  believe,"  "  Thou 
art  the  Christ,"  "  He  is  really  risen," 
"  Thou  knowest  all  things,"  and  the  like. 
What,  then,  is  the  real  increment .''  A  little 
more  faith  in  the  Lord,  and  a  great  deal 
more  of  resulting  experience ;  a  sense  of 
personal  union  with  Him  and  of  personal 
interest  in  His  grace  and  His  promises ;  a 
conviction  that  the  promise  is  to  us  which 
will  enable  us  presently  to  say  to  some  one 
else  that  "  the  promise  is  to  you  "  ;  a  conviction 
for  holiness  which  will  result  presently  in  a 
confession  of  holiness,  as  the  Spirit  of  Truth 
shall  lead.  But  all  of  this  is  outside  the 
region  of  dogmatic  Christianity,  which  stands, 
after  Pentecost,  just  where  it  did  before,  with 
one  foundation  of  God  laid,  and  every  man 
diligently  building  thereon.  The  right  way 
to  understand  the  difference  which  the  great 
Visitation  made  is  to  imagine  what  would  have 
happened   if  they  had  gone  on  without  it,   if 


176  THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT 

they  had  not  tarried  in  Jerusalem  for  the 
Divine  equipment.  They  could  have  gone  on 
without  it  ;  they  already  v^ere  a  Church  ;  their 
names  were  written  both  in  earth  and  heaven  ; 
they  had  a  message  to  the  world  (exactly  the 
same  message  substantially  on  either  hypothesis, 
whether  they  preached  as  baptized  or  as  un- 
baptized  of  the  Spirit).  So  they  might  have 
made  some  progress.  And  perhaps  it  might 
not  have  been  altogether  unlike  the  experience 
of  some  modern  Churches,  where  they  do  not 
preach  upon  the  text,  "  The  little  one  shall 
become  a  thousand,"  but  where  they  discuss 
whether  they  are  keeping  up  with  the  popu- 
lation and  its  normal  growth.  In  that  case 
Peter  might  have  said  to  the  first  believers, 
"  We  are  now  a  hundred  and  twenty  in 
number,  and  Christ  is  risen  ;  perhaps  by  the 
end  of  the  year  we  shall  be  a  hundred  and 
twenty-one."  But  what  saith  the  Scripture  ? — 
**  The  same  day  there  were  added  to  the  church 
three  thousand  souls."  That  was  the  differ- 
ence.    The  little  one  became  a  thousand  under 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  177 

their  eyes,  and  they  could  see  the  mustard-seed 
grow  and  become  a  tree  as  they  watched  it. 
But  it  may  be  urged  that  although  the  bases  of 
belief  were  fixed  before  Pentecost,  and  most  of 
them  long  before,  yet  in  regard  to  the  par- 
ticular doctrine  of  that  special  elect  day  there 
must  have  been  some  increment  of  knowledge 
and  of  teaching.  Or  are  we  to  say  that  the 
experience  of  the  Day  of  Pentecost  involves  no 
more  than  a  personal  application  of  truths 
already  believed,  as  though  the  seal  and  the 
wax  had  long  been  in  the  neighbourhood  of 
each  other,  but  now  the  wax  was  softened  and 
the  seal  applied.'^ 

I  do  not  care  to  define  too  closely  in  such 
matters.  To  put  the  matter  plainly  for 
practical  people,  the  Pentecostal  gift  is,  to  a 
large  extent,  one  of  the  lapsed  experiences  of 
the  Christian  Church.  Every  believer  ought  to 
have  the  experience  ;  only  a  few  really  have  it, 
and  confess  it.  For  us,  then,  it  is  not  a  ques- 
tion how  the  first  believers  reached  the  blessing, 
but  how  may  modern  believers  get  back  to  it. 

13 


178  THE  GIFT  OF   THE   HOLY  SPIRIT 

As  far  as  we  are  concerned,  the  gift  and  grace 
of  which  we  speak  lies  in  the  Spiritual  Lost 
Property  Office.  And  if  that  is  so,  I  say  with- 
out hesitation  that  a  minute  description  of  the 
lost  property  is  not  necessary  to  the  establish- 
ment of  a  claim.  The  fact  that  you  are  seeking 
something  which  you  have  lost  is  presumptive 
evidence  in  your  favour. 

My  wife  once  lost  her  gold  watch  in  London, 
and  I  went  to  Scotland  Yard  in  quest  of  it. 
They  asked  me,  "  What  sort  of  a  watch  was 
it  ?  "  I  said,  "A  gold  watch  with  an  inscription 
inside  the  case."  "  What  was  the  inscription.?  " 
That  it  "  was  given  to  Helen  Balkwill  on  the 
occasion  of  her  marriage  by  the  ladies  of  the 
Temperance  Association  of  Plymouth,  Stone- 
house,  and  Devonport."  The  official  said,  "  You 
are  wrong."  I  should  have  said,  "  Of  the  Three 
Towns."  But  he  handed  over  the  watch.  My 
identification  was  sufficient,  even  if  it  was  not 
exact. 

And  while  we  value  exactness  in  spiritual 
things,  wherever  it  can  be  obtained  by  creatures 


THE  GIFT  OF   THE  HOLY  SPIRIT  179 

as  normally  inexact  as  ourselves,  we  need  not 
think  that  it  all  turns  on  an  exact  definition. 
The  theology  of  the  experience  is  not  abso- 
lutely necessary  to  the  experience.  What  is 
necessary  is  that  we  should  hunger  and  thirst 
after  righteousness.  What  is  certain  is  that  if 
we  do  so  hunger  we  shall  be  sated. 


AARON'S  BLESSING 


CHAPTER  VIII 


AARON    S    BLESSING 


T\77E  began  this  little  volume  of  addresses 
^  with  a  talk  on  the  breastplate  of  Aaron  ; 
we  will  conclude  it  with  a  few  thoughts  on  the 
high-priestly  benediction.  You  will  find  it 
recorded  in  the  sixth  chapter  of  Numbers, 
where  it  runs  as  follows  : — 


"On    this    wise    ye  shall  bless  the  children  of  Israel, 
saying  unto  them  : 

The  Lord  bless  thee  and  keep  thee  : 

The  Lord  make  His  face  to  shine  upon  thee,  and  be 
gracious  unto  thee  : 

The  Lord    lift    up    His   countenance    upon   thee,   and 
give  thee  peace. 

And   so  shall  they  put   My   name   upon    the   children 
of  Israel ;  and  I  will  bless  them." 

183 


i84  AARON'S  BLESSING 

The   Scriptures    are    rich,    characteristically 
rich,  uniquely  rich,  in  the  matter  of  doxologies 
and  of  benedictions  ;    if  only  these  two  forms 
of  worship,  the  exercise  of  the  soul  respectively 
towards  God  and  man,  were  to  be  collected, 
what  a  lovely  little    book   would  be  made  by 
the  process  of  selection  !  what   mountain  tops 
of  dogma  would  be  reached,  what  Pisgah  sights 
of  Christian  experience  would    be   rolled   out 
before  our  eyes  and  before   our  feet — that  is 
to   say,  before    our   faith — so   that   we   might 
acknowledge  the  grace   and  possess  the  land, 
the  good  land  which  the  Lord  our  God  giveth 
us!     All  that  has  ever  been  said  of  the  Divine 
Nature  would  be  in  the  book,  for  the  doxolo- 
gies and  the  benedictions    use  the  same  theo- 
logical language.      If  one  says  "  Holy,  holy, 
holy  is  the  Lord     God    Almighty,"  the  other 
responds  with  "  The  grace  of  our  Lord  Jesus 
Christ,  the  love  of  God,  and  the  communion 
of  the    Holy   Ghost    be   with  thy  spirit,"   so 
that  the   Benediction  is  itself   a  creed,  and   a 
creed  which  is  a  life,  and  a  life  which  is  love. 


AARON'S  BLESSING  185 

No  Stronger  statements,  no  deeper  insights  into 
the  full  meaning  of  salvation,  can  ever  be 
obtained  than  those  which  fall  upon  our  ears 
when  the  Lord  or  His  messengers  are  set  to 
bless  the  people.  And  this  is  not  only  true 
of  the  New  Testament,  it  occurs  and  prevails 
throughout  the  Old  ;  if  the  degree  varies,  the 
benediction  is  the  same  in  kind  :  the  same 
grace  and  the  same  glory  from  the  same  Lord, 
who  is  rich  unto  all  that  call  upon  Him  in 
truth,  especially  when  they  call  upon  Him  for 
others. 

Now,  the  benediction  of  which  we  are 
speaking,  the  one  in  the  Book  of  Numbers, 
will  be  found  located  in  the  midst  of  matter 
of  all  degrees  of  spiritual  value  ;  so  that,  if  we 
were  reading  continuously,  we  should  stumble 
upon  it  unexpectedly,  and  pass  away  from  it, 
when  we  had  read  it,  much  as  we  would  pass 
from  an  oasis  into  a  desert.  For  it  is  preceded, 
in  the  biblical  narration,  by  the  rules  for  the 
manufacture  and  the  administration  of  "  curs- 
ing water,"  of  which  one  can  only  say  that  it 


i86  AARON'S  BLESSING 

is  a  leaf  out  of  an  old  magic-book,  and  that 
its  spiritual  value  is  absolutely  nil.  In  the 
same  connection  we  have  the  law  by  which 
the  Nazarite  separates  himself  from  wine  and 
strong  drink  ;  and  while,  perhaps,  we  shall  have 
to  admit  that  the  Nazarite  went  into  the 
region  of  ethical  extravagance  in  refusing  to 
touch  even  the  seeds  of  the  grape,  we  can 
hardly  say  that  Nazarite  vows  are  out  of  date, 
or  that  they  have  lost  their  spiritual  value. 
So  the  benediction  is  preceded  by  matter  that 
cannot  be  uniformly  classified  when  we  are 
estimating  spiritual  truth  or  utility.  And  we 
notice,  further,  that  it  is  followed  by  the  story 
of  the  offering  of  silver  dishes  and  golden 
spoons  by  the  princes  of  the  congregation,  an 
account  which  instinctively  provokes  a  criticism 
that  such  benefactions  are  not  always  as  holy 
as  they  look,  for  even  in  our  own  day  we  have 
many  opportunities  of  observing  how  money 
is  made  irreligiously  and  then  bestowed  reli- 
giously ;  how  the  stock-gambler  adorns  the 
altar  and  the  distiller  builds  the  cathedral,  and 


AARON'S  BLESSING  187 

how  both  give  as  the  world  giveth,  including, 
amongst  other  features  of  generosity,  the  deter- 
mination to  give  no  more  if  the  gift  should 
not  be  allowed  to  act  as  an  ethical  anodyne. 
And  if  such  gifts,  at  least  in  our  own  day, 
represent  a  varying  spiritual  value  from  zero 
upwards,  there  is  also  a  critical  question  (into 
which  we  cannot  go  here)  as  to  how  such  a 
plate-audit  as  is  here  described  in  the  Penta- 
teuch, expressed  in  troy-weights  of  the  sanc- 
tuary, can  have  taken  place  in  the  wilderness. 
But,  doubt  as  we  may  about  the  setting  of  the 
benediction  and  the  relative  value  in  morals 
or  in  history  of  that  in  the  midst  of  which  it 
is  found,  we  can  have  no  doubt  about  the  bene- 
diction itself.  That,  at  all  events,  is  pure  gold, 
and  if  we  do  not  find  it  possible  to  be  enthu- 
siastic over  the  surrounding  matter,  we  may 
say  that  the  Scriptures  vindicate  themselves  by 
the  suddenness  of  their  enchanted  changes,  as 
Ruskin  used  to  say  of  the  Derbyshire  dales. 

From  this  form   of   blessing  we  learn  that 
God  makes  his  face  to  shine  upon  us,  and  it  is 


i88  AARON'S  BLESSING 

easy  to  infer  that  He  does  this  either  directly 
or  by  reflection.  Nor  will  it  be  easy  to  decide 
in  which  of  these  two  ways  the  illumination 
may  come,  whether  from  the  immediate  life 
and  light  of  God  or  from  the  dwelling  of  God 
in  some  neighbour  soul.  For  it  is  constantly 
happening  in  each  of  the  two  ways.  To  use 
the  similitudes  of  the  Holy  Grail,  we  have  first 
the  case  of  Percival's  sister  who  sees  the  vision, 
after  long  prayer,  and  fasting,  and  patience, 
in  her  own  cell,  upon  whose  white  walls  the 
Heavenly  Vision  descends,  and  the  sweet  Grail 
is  seen — 

"  Rose-red  with  beatings  in  it,  as  if  alive." 

That  is  the  first  form  of  the  vision,  according 
to  which  "  God  has  a  few  of  us "  (and  one 
is  tempted  to  ask,  "Why  not  many  ?  ")  "whom 
He  whispers  in  the  ear."  Or  to  get  back  to 
biblical  language,  "  In  all  ages  Wisdom  enters 
into  holy  souls,  and  makes  them  friends  of  God 
and  prophets."  That  is  direct  vision  and 
immediate  audition — the  seeing  for  oneself  of 


AARON'S  BLESSING  189 

which  Job  talked.  But  then,  still  on  the  line  of 
the  Holy  Grail  and  its  lessons,  there  are  those 
who  see  through  the  eyes  of  the  one  that  has 
seen,  such  as  Percival  and  Galahad  when  the 
message  comes  to  them  that  **  the  holy  thing 
is  here  again  among  us,  brother." 

"  She  shot  the  deathless  passion  in  her  eyes 
Through  him,  and  made  him  hers,  and  laid  her  mind 
On  him,  and  he  believed  in  her  belief." 

That  is  the  indirect  vision  ;  it  leads  on  to 
direct  vision  later,  but  it  begins,  as  Galahad 
confesses,  with  what  "  thy  sister  taught  me  first 
to  see."  This  is  a  Scriptural  method  ;  it  is  in 
the  Old  Testament,  in  the  form,  "  O  taste  and 
see  how  gracious  the  Lord  is,"  and  in  the  New 
Testament  in  the  form,  "  That  which  our  eyes 
have  looked  upon  declare  we  unto  you."  Such 
being  the  distinction  between  the  vision  direct 
and  the  vision  reflected,  it  seems  clear  that  we 
must  be  prepared  for  either  form  of  illumina- 
tion, and  be  willing  to  learn  fresh  truths  about 
God,  either  directly  or  by  intermediaries.     The 


rgo  AARON'S  BLESSING 

first  of  the  two  methods  is  the  doctrine  of 
immediate  inspiration  ;  it  is  individualist  to  the 
last  degree,  expresses  itself  in  the  first  person 
singular  and  in  the  second  person  singular,  and 
not  at  all  in  the  third  person  plural.  Its  descrip- 
tion is  of  the  form  contained  in  the  words, 
"  And  the  Lord  said  unto  Moses,  I  saw  the  Lord 
sitting  upon  a  throne,"  or  "  The  word  of  the 
Lord  came  to  John  the  son  of  Zachariah  in  the 
wilderness  y 

The  second  method  of  illumination  consists 
in  seeing  God  in  other  people  and  by  other 
people.  It  is  socialist  in  character,  closely  con- 
nected with  the  structure  of  the  Church,  by 
which  the  manifold  wisdom  of  God  is  made 
known,  even  to  principalities  and  powers,  and 
it  involves  a  willingness  to  receive,  which  is 
often  a  harder  grace  to  obtain  than  that  of 
giving.  Its  watchword  might  be,  "  They 
glorified  God  in  me,"  or  "The  children  of  Israel 
saw  the  skin  of  the  face  of  Moses  that  it 
shone" ;  or  the  same  thought  may  be  expressed 
in  a  stray  testimony  which  has  come  down  out 


AARON'S  BLESSING  191 

of  the  early  Church  to  the  effect  that  "  thou 
hast  seen  thy  brother,  thou  hast  seen  thy  God ! " 
I  have  a  conviction  that  it  often  pleases  God 
to  humble  us  by  the  means  which  He  chooses 
to  illuminate  us.  It  is  related  of  Jacob  Behmen, 
the  great  German  mystic,  that  the  immediate 
cause  of  the  revelation  which  changed  his  whole 
life  was  the  reflection  of  a  sunbeam  upon  him 
from  a  bit  of  glass  or  tin  that  was  lying  in  the 
road.  From  that  bit  of  tin  he  became  illu- 
minated and  illuminating.  William  Law  sat 
at  his  feet,  and  so,  they  say,  did  Hegel  and 
ever  so  many  more  noble  souls.  All  that,  shall 
we  say,  from  one  little  bit  of  tin .''  Well,  that 
will  serve  for  allegory.  Suppose  the  bit  of  tin 
to  be  a  human  soul,  the  humblest  of  souls, 
humbler  for  its  very  vision,  less  because  it  has 
become  more  ;  how  often  does  the  Lord  send 
us  to  school  to  such,  that  they  may  tell  us  the 
secrets  of  the  Kingdom,  and  instruct  us  how 
we  may  more  effectively  lose  ourselves  and  find 
Him  !  It  pleases  Him  to  perfect  praise  in  a 
'  choir  of  babes  and  so  to  still  the  enemy  and 


192  AARON'S  BLESSING 

the  avenger  ;  He  sets  the  old  to  learn  of  the 
young,  the  rich  of  the  poor,  the  scribe  of  the 
illiterate.  It  makes  for  solidarity,  too,  when 
maid-servants  prophesy,  and  when  old  men  and 
young  men  are  able  to  exchange  their  dreams. 

Now,  if  this  be  the  case,  then  it  follows  that 
we  must  prepare  ourselves  in  advance  to  learn 
great  truths  of  unlikely  people.  This  is  a 
great  grace,  and  almost  all  great  souls  have 
it.  John  Wesley,  for  example,  was  con- 
spicuous therein.  He  went  to  the  Moravian 
meeting  to  hear  some  one  read  Luther's  Pre- 
face to  the  Romans,  and  the  whole  world  is 
richer  for  his  going.  True,  he  went  reluc- 
tantly, but  he  went ;  and  a  strange  warmth 
at  the  heart  was  his  benediction.  I  am  afraid 
if  he  had  lived  in  the  present  day  he  would 
have  run  the  risk  of  putting  himself  under 
vows  never  to  drink  of  an  unauthorised 
spring !  How  many  there  are  who  make 
themselves  and  their  world  the  poorer  because 
they  promise  their  guides  never  to  attend  a 
Nonconformist    meeting,    or,    to   speak    more 


AARON'S  BLESSING  193 

generally,  who  refuse  in  advance  to  go  where 
grace  entices  them.  But  I  can  hardly  think 
that  Wesley  could  have  been  permanently 
made  into  a  man  of  such  narrow  outlook  ;  if 
he  had  been,  he  would  never  have  had  the 
world  for  his  parish. 

And  if  we  are  right  that  great  truths  are 
often  to  be  learned  of  unlikely  teachers,  I 
believe  it  will  be  found  that  this  is  especially 
true  in  the  region  of  the  inward  life,  where 
our  progress  so  often  turns  upon  our  losing 
sight  of  or  inverting  the  scale  of  values  which 
prevails  in  the  world  and  in  the  Church.  The 
doctrine  of  sanctification,  for  instance,  is  seldom 
learnt  from  those  whom  we  should  naturally 
elect  to  teach  us.  Madame  Guyon  learnt  it, 
or  one  branch  of  it,  from  a  beggar  on  a  bridge, 
whom  she  saw  once,  if  I  remember  rightly,  and 
no  more.  In  this  region  of  the  spiritual  life^ 
at  all  events,  it  pays  to  look  down. 

But  we  must  return  to  our  benediction  ;  and 
it  would  not  be  proper  to  pass  away  from  the 
Old  Testament  presentation  of  it  (it  is,  as  we 

14 


194  AARON'S  BLESSING 

have  implied,  neither  old  nor  new,  but  simply 
eternal)  without  asking  what  becomes  of  the 
high  priest  who  is,  under  the  ancient  theo- 
logy, God's  benedictional  delegate.  Must  it 
not  be  that  this  delegated  power  to  bless 
inheres  in  the  Church  and  is  the  privilege 
of  the  believer,  and  that  even  if  Aaron  is 
caught  away  his  office  remains  ?  It  was  said 
to  Abraham,  "  I  will  bless  thee  and  be  thou 
a  blessing."  Is  there  any  one  of  us  that  ought 
to  be  less  richly  endowed,  either  in  reception 
or  in  transmission  ?  Is  not  the  priestly  and 
intercessional  man  and  woman  with  us  yet  ? 
Do  they  not  still  put  the  name  of  the  Lord 
on  the  children  of  Israel,  and  lift  hands  of 
prayer  and  say,  "The  Lord  bless  thee  and 
keep  thee "  ?  And  from  some  souls  over 
some  souls  the  fountain  of  intercession  plays 
night  and  day.  If  we  watch  them  at  their 
work  we  shall  soon  learn  some  of  their  secrets  ; 
one  is  that  they  do  not  "  ask  in  prayer  that 
which  others  may  not  share,"  by  which  means 
prayer   is   continually   retranslated   into    bene- 


AARON'S  BLESSING  195 

diction  ;  another  is  that  they  are  always 
wishing  for  others  more  of  the  joy  of  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  than  they  have  them- 
selves ;  and  a  third  is  that  they  rejoice  in  the 
work  of  other  of  God's  people  as  if  it  were 
their  own.  And,  last  of  all,  they  are  as  skilled 
in  saying,  "  Hast  Thou  not  a  blessing  for  this 
one  ?  "  as  in  the  necessary  art  of  asking,  "  Hast 
Thou  not  a  blessing  for  me,  even  for  me  ?  " 
For  those  that  are  of  such  a  spirit  the  fields 
are  always  white  to  the  harvest  ;  they 
continually  gather  fruit  unto  life  eternal. 


Zbe  Oreebam  pvceet 

UNWIN  BROTHERS,  LIMITED, 
WOKING  AND  LONDON. 


f" 


sx 


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